Electric Velocipede » Electric Velocipede

2011 Award Eligible Work & People

JohnK — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:37:38 +0000

Electric Velocipede 21/22

(2010 cover date, but the issue was released in 2011)

This was our last print issue. (In the table of contents, n = novelette, and ss = short story)

FICTION

“Witherking” by T. J. Berg n
“Care and Feeding of Your Piano” by William Shunn ss
“Pistols at Dawn Amongst the Evergreens” by Samuel Mae ss
“In the Beginnings” by Shannon Page and Jay Lake ss
“The Next Day” by Dave Justus ss
“Shoes Worn Once” by Keffy R. M. Kehrli ss
“Memories of Chalice” by Peter M. Ball ss
“∞°” by Darin Bradley ss
“The Comedy at Kualoa” by Monica Byrne ss
“The Stonecutter” by Damon Kaswell ss
“The Portal to Heaven” by Shira Lipkin ss
“Intrepid Travelers” by Josh Rountree n
“Carte Blanche” by Genevieve Valentine ss
“Worm Days” by Karl Bunker ss
“Unlocking the God” by L. L. Hannett ss
“My Lovesick Zombie Boy Band” by Damien G. Walter ss
“Beata Beatrix” by Jenna Waterford ss
“An Abiding Memory of Scarecrows” by William Knight ss
“Pie in the Sky” by Michaela Roessner ss
“Gaining Traction” by Jonathan Wood ss
“Checkmate” by Brian Trent ss

POETRY

“Frazier” by Lauren Henley
“A Mermaid’s Catch” by Brenda Stokes
“In the Dark” by Ki Russell
“Infatuectomy” by Ki Russell
“Drowning in Pearls” by Ki Russell
“Patience” by E. Lily Yu
“The Long Trajectory” by Geoffrey A. Landis

NONFICTION

Interview with J. M. McDermott
Content TKTK: Brains Lite by John Ottinger III
Sampling the Aspic with Penelope O’Shea
Blindfold Taste Test with Jim C. Hines
A Remembrance of the Future by John Klima

Electric Velocipede 23

Our first all online issue. All the content is available, for free, online.

Miscellaneous

Beyond the individual pieces and stories, Electric Velocipede is eligible as a Semiprozine for Hugo purposes and as a Special Award, Non-Professional with regards to the World Fantasy Award.

Thom Davidsohn is eligible Best Fan Artist, although if people feel he should be in Best Professional Artist, let us know and we’ll change this to reflect that.

Our editor John Klima is eligible for the Best Editor – Short Form Hugo Award.

CapriCon Hugo Panel

JohnK — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:44:34 +0000

The panel was about Hugo recommendations with Lynne M. Thomas, Michael D. Thomas, James Bacon, and John Klima. Bacon was the true superstar of the panel, with many interesting suggestions (like the China Mieville story below) and thoughts on most every category. Recommended items will be listed by category.

Novel

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine

Novelette

“Covehithe” by China Mieville (The Guardian online, April 22, 2011)

Short Story

‘‘∞º’’ by Darin Bradley (Electric Velocipede #21/22 Fall ’10)

“The Art Disease” by Dennis Danvers (Electric Velocipede #23, Fall ’11)

As Promised

The lovely and charming (and smart and funny and amazing and well, loads of other cool things) Lynne M. Thomas has all of our recs up on her site.

Locus 2011 Recommended Reading List and Much, Much More!

JohnK — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:58:27 +0000

The annual LOCUS Recommended Reading List is out. As always, there’s a ton of great stuff on there. The list typically makes us feel under-read and frankly more than a little lazy. But, since the list is compiled by more than fifteen people–many of whom work in publishing for a living and keeping on top of what’s been published over the past year is directly pertinent to their jobs–we don’t feel so bad (at the very least we’re outnumbered and more people should read more things than less people…ok, we’re rambling). This year there’s a handful of Electric Velocipede and related material that made the list.

In short fiction:
‘‘Memories of Chalice’’ by Peter M. Ball (Electric Velocipede Fall ’10)
‘‘∞º’’ by Darin Bradley (Electric Velocipede Fall ’10)

In reprint anthologies:
Happily Ever After, John Klima, ed. (Night Shade)

First, while issue #21/22 has a 2010 cover date, the issue did not see the light of day until 2011. It should be considered as being published in that year. Also, we’re hoping the lack of entries from issue #23 is more due to the fact that people haven’t realized that we’re available online than to the fact that the fiction is just not very good.

There’s some quality work from the issue #23 like Dennis Danvers’ “The Art Disease,” Richard Butner’s “Through the Uprights,” Deborah Fitchett’s humorous “Fish Out of Water,” and Alexandra Seidel’s poems “Her Mother’s Bees” and “The Girl and Her Cloud.” (and you should really just go read the whole issue, it’s damn good)

This is also the time of year of award nominations. The Nebula Award nominations are due by February 15 and the Hugo Award nominations are due by March 11. Also, there’s the LOCUS poll that you can fill out online, and that closes on April 15.

Finally, J. M. McDermott talks about working with editors over on the always interesting Night Bazaar blog and he mentions our indefatigable editor among many other highly esteemed editors like Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, and Sheila Williams.

“Through the Uprights” by Richard Butner

Anne — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:35 +0000

“I want to kick a field goal,” Robin said. He didn’t say: I want to learn how to kick a field goal. Robin wasn’t process-oriented. He wanted to be the sort of person with the ability to kick field goals. He wanted to do all kinds of extraordinary things, but he had never mentioned football before. We had taken the same P.E. classes: bowling, badminton, ballroom dancing, and fencing. Robin picked them, supposing that they’d have the most favorable female to male ratios. And that the fencing and dancing classes would transform us into a pair of dashing swashbucklers.

I didn’t feel very dashing, writhing in pain on the mat after my Achilles tendon detached, rolled up like a crappy window shade. I remember lying there for what seemed like an hour, tears streaming down my cheeks behind the metal mesh of a fencing mask. I was out of commission for two months, on crutches, with a medical drop that fulfilled my P.E. requirement. Robin stopped attending the class too, in a show of solidarity.

Here are some other things that Robin wanted to do: spray-paint “Fuck Chancellor Digsby” on the World War II memorial at the north end of campus. Break into the campus computers and change his transcript to a perfect 4.0 average. (He didn’t know anything about computers, but he’d seen that movie War Games.) He wanted to sneak on to the roof of the library and have an all-night poker game, ten stories up, from sunset to sunrise.

“And then, just as the sun is rising, we jump off the roof.”

He was going to make parachutes. I was pretty sure that a parachute wouldn’t work at that height.

It didn’t matter, because Robin hadn’t done any of those things. The closest he came was the graffiti, but I convinced him that defacing a monument dedicated to the memory of guys who fought and died while being shot at by Nazis was not cool. He had the spray paint can in his hand, though, shaking it and rattling that little ball.

Here are some things Robin did: he drove his Maverick into the side of the Piggly Wiggly. The car was totaled; the brick wall of the store is still scarred. I wasn’t with him at the time. That was when I was going out with Gretchen.

He read Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye at least ten times each. Probably closer to twenty. He built most of the furniture in our room, including the big sleeping loft, complete with the spiral staircase. When I was still on crutches, he offered to add on a cradle and pulley system, so I could hoist myself up there to sleep. I crashed on the couch instead, two solid months of ruining my back even as my leg healed.

By then Robin only owned those two books. He’d sold his textbooks halfway through the semester when he stopped attending all of his classes. He obsessively read the school paper, too, and the local paper when someone would leave a copy lying around the snack bar. He had one well-thumbed issue of Penthouse. I don’t think he spent a lot of time reading the in-depth Patti Smith interview, but I could be wrong.

So anyway, to kick a field goal you need a football, which we didn’t have. You also need goalposts, which in our case were surprisingly convenient. Our dorm overlooked the abandoned 1920s football stadium. In fact, it was less than ten feet from our window to the top of the concrete bleachers. We were in the old part of campus, where all the supposedly historic buildings were jammed up against each other. That was Robin’s first project after he stopped going to classes: he built a drawbridge so we could just walk out of our window and into the stadium. He was studying to be an engineer, so even though he’d flunked Statics and Dynamics, I trusted his workmanship enough to stroll out on the drawbridge, two stories up.

The stadium had been slated for destruction since the 1960s, when they built some new monstrosity away from the main campus, but here it was 1989 and it still hadn’t been torn down. The bleachers were just bare concrete with rusted handrails. The field itself was crisscrossed with footpaths. The old field house at one end was used as storage for the campus painters. Every day people in white coveralls drove up, loaded cans into their pickup truck with the university logo on the side, and then sped off to paint a new laboratory, or an old dormitory, or to cover up some graffiti. Robin wouldn’t have had a chance with “Fuck Chancellor Digsby.” We had the best painted campus in the state, except for the old stadium itself, which was cracked and peeling in places where it had been painted silver some years ago. In other places, you could still see the fading numerals pointing fans of decades past to seating sections R101 through S105 or wherever.

And in warm weather, people sunbathed on the far set of bleachers. Because of this, Robin built a telescope. He would sit there, eye fixed on the lenspiece, not moving, silent. Would it have been creepier if he actually had something to say about the blonde in the string bikini, or the redhead who undid her bra straps to get a better tan? I usually went down to the snack bar when he started his telescope meditations.

But of course, when he wasn’t around, I looked through the telescope too.

One set of goalposts, the set near the old field house, was gone. But the other still stood, covered in ivy. Standing in the field, looking through those goalposts, you could see the Bryce Theater framed perfectly. That’s where I was taking Introduction to Stagecraft. It was my free elective.

Bryce Theater really was historic. It was built in 1916, with money from a local timber tycoon. When the university was the cultural center of the town, Bryce Theater was the bullseye. Duke Ellington played there. Vaudeville tours stopped there. But the coolest thing of all was this: Harry Houdini performed there once.

Houdini had to perform somewhere, right? But you never think much about it, it’s not like there would be a sign saying: “In this location in 1923, Harry Houdini was buried alive, but he escaped.” But that’s what happened. I got all this history on the first day of Dr. Newton’s class. He took us out onto the stage to show us the very trapdoor through which Houdini escaped. Nothing much historic happened in the theater anymore, though. Just classes, and the university didn’t even offer a real theater degree, but rather something called “Speech Communications.” Still, they managed to produce four plays a year, always the same categories: a drama, a comedy, a musical, and a Shakespeare. The old trapdoor wasn’t getting used much.

The theater is where I met Lucinda. Lucinda Anne Yates. She’d be the first to point out that her initials are L-A-Y. And woe be unto anyone who tries to call her Cindy. She is Lucinda, all three syllables no matter who’s bleeding or what’s on fire. She wasn’t taking any theater classes; she had already taken them all. She was one of a handful of students who worked in the theater for fun. That was all there was to be had there. Certainly there was no acclaim—the local paper didn’t bother to send their reviewer. The house was never more than half full, except for the nights when they pulled down the big white screen and showed old movies.

I met Lucinda when I was painting flats for You Can’t Take it with You. That’s when I met her, but of course I’d seen her before. Last fall, before the weather turned cold. She was the redhead who undid her bra straps to get a better tan. I mentioned this to Robin and the next night he was over in the scene shop, helping us paint.

Robin turned out to be as good a painter as he was carpenter and tinker. He was absolutely focused on covering each flat with a uniform coat of color. He was meticulous about painting the trim and molding, even though from the audience no one would be able to see if he painted outside the lines. He didn’t talk while he worked, except to ask Lucinda what needed painting next.

I knew he didn’t plan to do anything as straightforward as asking her out. It’s not like I planned to ask her out, either. She was out of our league. Robin’s technique with women, which had been completely unsuccessful as far as I knew, involved stunts. The dance party where he was being beaten up and thrown around by an invisible attacker. The nights he spent out on the drawbridge, tightrope walking along the edges while he tried to strike up a conversation with any woman who wandered the sidewalk beneath. The fire trick, which was why I wasn’t going out with Gretchen anymore.

I spent a lot of nights on the phone, trying to patch it up with Gretchen, but the fire trick was stronger. She said we could get back together if I moved out of the dorm room, or made Robin move out. And neither of those things happened.

At first Lucinda was impressed by Robin’s volunteerism, not realizing then that he’d stopped doing all schoolwork and so had plenty of free time on his hands. After we finished painting that first night we adjourned to the twenty-four-hour breakfast place across from the war memorial. It was called The Breakfast Place. Lucinda recommended the cream cheese omelet, so we all had one each. Robin managed to get back to the dorm before getting violently ill. But we three were friends from then on, and even though he kept up his telescope duties, he never spied on Lucinda again.

Here’s another thing Robin did: he taught me how to hit a golf ball. Lucinda knew about an abandoned driving range east of town. She drove us out there—Robin couldn’t afford to have his car fixed after the crash into the grocery store, and I never had a car. Just past the river we took a right into a dirt driveway. At first it looked like there was nothing there but forest. The closest sign of civilization was an electrical supply warehouse in the distance. But at the edge of the dirt lot was a low chain-link fence. A No Trespassing sign was attached to it with a twisted coat hanger, but there was no gate.

Beyond the fence slumped a plywood shack painted reddish-brown, and beyond that the forest opened up onto a meadow that sloped down to the river, first gently, then precipitously. There were a dozen wooden stalls spaced out, overgrown with weeds. On the other side of the shack the ruins of a miniature golf course remained, cracked cement and bunched up AstroTurf peeking out from the underbrush. Several big pines had fallen, leaning against the concrete giraffes and elephants that would no longer entertain the children whose parents came to knock a few balls into the river.

Robin set down his bag and started sorting out clubs and balls. Lucinda observed that we were going to need more balls than Robin had. She smiled as she said this, though. She decided to break into the shack while I took the opportunity to scout around some more. Back in the woods, next to a pile of garbage, I found a Naugahyde recliner and I dragged it out to where I had a better view of the river, the shack, the gateless fence. It was a bright spring day, but the mosquitoes weren’t out yet. I sat down and flipped up the footrest. The Naugahyde warmed up quickly in the sun.

Robin went to help Lucinda, and after intermittent cursing, he managed to smash the padlock hasp off its crappy hinges. He emerged from the shack with a giant green plastic bucket of golf balls, and a giant splinter in the palm of his hand. He held it up to show us and blood streamed down his arm. Robin was a bleeder. I was used to it by then. As usual, he was waving the injured part around, refusing to stanch the flow. I knew that this would have little effect on Lucinda, and once Robin realized that too, he gave up and went back to setting up the golf equipment. He handed each of us a club. He knocked down the taller weeds in the three closest driving stalls. He poured out little mounds of balls for each of us. Mostly white and cracked, although there were some Day-Glo orange ones too.

Finally, after he’d managed to bleed all over his clubs, the balls, and the grass, he cleaned himself up with a towel and bandages Lucinda brought from her car. She had a well-stocked first aid kit with tweezers and antibiotic ointment, too. He wouldn’t let her touch the splinter, though. He yanked it out with the tweezers, blew off the antibiotic as unnecessary, and taped a wad of gauze into the palm of his hand. And then it was time for golf.

I hated golf. To me, golf was what the asshole rich kids of asshole rich parents did. Robin’s personal mythology was full of golf, but he wasn’t an asshole rich kid. At least, he wasn’t rich—his father was a government clerk, and his mother stayed home. Robin’s two favorite movies were M*A*S*H and Caddyshack. He’d actually been a caddy in high school back in Fairfax, which is how he saved up enough money for the Maverick, the golf clubs, and the carpentry tools. He was convinced that he had been hauling bags for CIA agents and that he had heard secrets which he couldn’t tell anyone.

“I could tell you,” he’d say, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

That bright day, once he’d stopped bleeding, he patiently taught me how to hit a golf ball. How to stand, how to hold the club. The first twenty swings, I couldn’t even hit the ball. I wanted to quit, but he wouldn’t let me. Meanwhile, Lucinda was whacking balls with perfect form. Finally, when I could at least knock the ball off the tee most times, Robin went and began his own driving practice. If his hand hurt him, he didn’t mention it. We didn’t stop swinging until we’d sent all of the balls down the slope, into the tall weeds or into the river.

“All right, Lucinda,” Robin said, drawing out the three syllables of her name. “Let’s go pick them up and start over again.”

“In that underbrush, are you crazy?” Lucinda said. “Our work here is done.”

Lucinda wasn’t there, though, the night Robin mentioned field goals, and then said, “We can make a football.” In case it’s not clear already, Robin liked to make things. Our loft was the most sophisticated one on campus. It helped that we were in an old dorm with gigantic rooms and high ceilings. Our sleeping compartments were divided by a wall with built-in shelves and lighting. Of course, Robin’s shelves were empty by then. There was a ladder to get to my side, and the spiral staircase led to Robin’s half. The staircase was all hand-cut two-by-fours; he’d designed it in drafting class. He’d carefully stapled white Christmas lights around all the edges of the loft. Lit up, the structure was an odd kind of runway. He built his own desk, too, but only because he’d sawed up the university-issued one on the night before Halloween. The replacement was far superior. All of this, using just the hand tools he kept in his closet.

So, the football. Robin rummaged and found a roll of duct tape. Fifty cents and one trip to the drink machine later, he started winding the tape around a full can of Coke. Eventually he had something vaguely football shaped, albeit squishier. I told him I’d hold the ball for him, but first I made him swear, holding his hand on the copy of Catch-22, that he wouldn’t kick me.

He opened the window and lowered the drawbridge, and we marched into the crappy silver stadium with our crappy silver football. The field was barely illuminated by one streetlight outside the old field house. At the other end of the field, Robin marked off twenty paces from the goalpost and I set up there, holding the makeshift ball under the tip of my index finger.

It played out much like my day at the driving range: Robin whiffed the first few tries. When he finally got a piece of the ball, he only managed to knock it a few feet, so that it tumbled sadly along the ground. “You’re pushing it down too much,” he said. I didn’t respond, I just held up the ball so he could see it. It was already creased in the place where he’d kicked it. I remembered his patience at the driving range, though, so I dutifully continued to hold the ball, and retrieve the ball, over and over, switching from my right to left side as my legs cramped up. Robin got better, able to get some height on the ball even though I hadn’t changed how I was holding it one bit.

“Let’s get closer,” he said, so I walked half the distance to the goal. He backed up five steps and then ran up and booted the ball solidly. I thought of the full Coke can inside, wondering if it would explode. The ball shot up toward the goalposts, gleaming in the faint light from the other end of the field.

It went through the goalposts, and then it vanished. I don’t mean we couldn’t see it any more. I mean it ceased to exist.

We didn’t talk about it until we got back to the room, raised the drawbridge, and shut the window. We had spent a few minutes poking around in what used to be the end zone, which was just a big patch of ivy and bushes on a slope down from the theater. Robin uncovered a storm drain, but the grate on it was much too small to admit our ad hoc football.

“Well, that was weird,” I said, as I flopped onto the couch and as Robin settled into his desk chair.

“Check,” Robin said, signing a V in the air with his index finger. His hand was still swollen and pink, from where the splinter had got infected. “I have now kicked a field goal.”

“That wasn’t weird?”

“Trick of the light,” he said. “We’re going to go out there tomorrow morning and find that ball. And if it’s not there, well, maybe someone will have picked it up in the meantime.”

“Are you practicing for your evaluation for the psych drop?” That was Robin’s big plan. He was going to get a psychological drop to blot this year’s failures from his record. Next fall, he swore, he’d buckle down. Maybe he’d change his major. Either political science, or pre-law.

“You’re the crazy one, believing that something can vanish into thin air,” Robin said.

I knew the ball had vanished. I had seen it vanish. But I didn’t argue with Robin. I just wondered what the next item on his checklist would be.

Lucinda didn’t live on campus; she had a studio apartment within walking distance. The theater let her use one of the old dressing rooms as an office and general staging area. Every day she hauled in an army surplus knapsack: pounds of textbooks, bananas and apples (she seemed to exist on fresh fruit and cream cheese omelets), first aid kit, a plaid Thermos full of herbal tea, and several changes of clothes, including her bikini and a beach towel once the weather turned warm.

No spare shoes, though, because Lucinda only ever wore clogs. Which was weird, because I hadn’t seen anyone wearing clogs since I was a kid. And doubly weird because she spent a lot of time on ladders. Extremely tall ladders.

One day, when it had become clear that Robin and I were her new helpers, whether there was course credit involved or not, she and I were sitting in her dressing room, sharing a cup of tea. She had loaned Robin her car for a trip to the hardware store. He loved the hardware store, and could spend hours in there just looking at hinges and pipe and tools. Robin had branched out from just helping with scenery. Now he was filling the theater with custom shelves: in the sound booth, in the scene shop, in the dressing rooms, in the prop closet. In exchange for this, Lucinda let him use the shop tools for his own projects.

Lucinda’s tea tasted like cinnamon and licorice, and I hate licorice.

“How do you do it?” I asked her, gesturing toward her clogs with my cup, sloshing tea onto the floor. “How do you manage not to fall and break your neck wearing those things?”

She crossed her legs and rocked her calf, flipping one clog out so that she held it in the grasp of her big toe.

“Years of practice?”

“I have this vision of you slipping and falling, but your clogs remaining perfectly balanced on the rung of the ladder.”

“I hope you also have a vision of yourself catching me after I slip and fall. Or do you always fantasize about women having terrible accidents?”
“Sorry. Let’s change the subject.”

“No, let’s not. Let’s have you practice wearing clogs.”

That’s what it was like in the theater with Lucinda. You were always learning something new. One day it was how to replace the carbon rods in a spotlight, and the next day it was how to walk in clogs. My feet weren’t that much bigger than hers, so that day I spent fifteen minutes clomping around the stage in her shoes. She knew I’d taken ballroom dancing, so by the end we were waltzing around the stage, and I managed not to tread on her bare feet. I didn’t climb any ladders, though.

The day after the field goal Robin and I crawled out of the loft around eight. We raised the window shades to see the poor suckers who were late to their eight o’clock classes scurrying across the field. The bathroom was a hive of activity, so I just brushed my teeth in the sink in the room and pulled on last night’s clothes. Robin did the same. He never bathed in the mornings. He didn’t like to be naked around other people.

“You got any golf balls left?” I asked.

“Yeah, I picked up a box of new ones, on sale.”

“OK, so you stole some golf balls.”

“I liberated these golf balls.”
“We’ll need a few of them, a tee, and a 2-iron.”

We took the more discreet exit from the dorm, down the side stairs and out the door next to the snack bar. Robin spent a few minutes poking through the underbrush with the golf club looking for the silver football, but found nothing. I took up a position at mid-field.

“It’s gone,” I shouted.

Finally, he gave up and walked over.

“I can prove it to you,” I said. “We’ve discovered something of monumental importance, and you’re ignoring it.”

I set a ball on the tee, and ran through a mental checklist of everything Robin had taught me about hitting a golf ball. I caught it squarely on the first try, sending it flying off of the tee, straight toward the uprights, and through them straight up the hill to Bryce Theater, where it smashed through one of the windows in the entrance hall.

“Nice proof,” Robin said, as we hustled back to the dorm. But he knew that something had happened the night before. I went off to classes, and when I got back that afternoon, I found him sitting at his telescope. He was not ogling women in bikinis. He was staring at the goalposts.

The next day, Saturday, Robin was back over at the theater. He was spending more time there than I was. Lucinda had even given him a key to the stage door. I guess part of it was, he’d filled our room up with things he’d built, so he needed a new place to construct things. I was in the room studying when the phone rang. It was Robin’s father.

“Hello, Mr. Hardaway,” I said.

“Call me Les,” he said. This was our standard exchange every time we talked on the phone. His real name was Leslie, not Les.

I didn’t like talking to Robin’s father, but it didn’t require much effort. I said “yes” now and then, and faked a laugh, and he kept up the rest of the conversation.

“How’s it hanging?”

“By a thread, Les, by a thread.”

“Is my progeny anywhere to be found? The goddam dryer’s broke. I was hoping he could talk me through fixing it.”

I said, “He’s out. I think he’s working on a class project.”

“Don’t lie to me, I know what he’s doing on a fine Saturday afternoon. He’s out hunting split-tail, isn’t he? Best done by the light of the moon, of course.”

I snorted, which Mr. Hardaway seemed to interpret as a conspiratorial laugh. That wasn’t my problem, was it?

I didn’t mention Lucinda, or the theater. It would only have sent Leslie into another spastic metaphor about picking up women. Actually I wasn’t sure what Robin was working on that day. I was pretty sure he was close to finishing all of the custom shelves. He had left the room early that morning, simply saying that he had an idea for a brand-new project.

“Speaking of hunting,” Mr. Hardaway said, “did I ever tell you about that time we stole a gun?” Mr. Hardaway had gone to school here too, and to hear him tell it, every day of his college career was like a scene out of Animal House.

“Me and the fraternity brothers got liquored up and went on a panty raid. They still have panty raids there, with the coeds?”

“Not that I’m aware of—” I said.

“Damn shame. So we’re on this panty raid, right, standing outside Coleman dorm and yelling to high heaven to see some lingerie. Well, the cop came. Because at that sweet time, there weren’t but one cop on campus, and he made Barney Fife look like a hard-boiled professional. He showed up and asked us to disperse, but instead we just circled up around him. It was dark and his puny flashlight didn’t help alleviate that situation. I got behind him and slipped his gun out of his holster. He went nuts after that, jerking that flashlight beam around and hollering, meanwhile we’re passing his gun around betwixt ourselves like a Chinese fire drill. We finally scattered off in different directions, and he ended up running after the wrong guy, old Archer Finlay, a second-string halfback on the football team.

“Of course the next day there was a big stink rumbling through campus. But he couldn’t identify anyone. We didn’t get any panties that night, but I ended up with the gun. I’ve still got it, too.”

“You’ve got the gun?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“You bet. It’s in the safe with my other valuables. I’ve never told the wife about it, that’d just be one more nag in an endless list of nags.”

“Les, could you go check on the gun? I want to know what it looks like.”

Mrs. Hardaway was off at Mass, so he humored me. I waited on the line and could hear him as he opened the safe and brought out his holy relic. He described it to me in loving detail, and spun the cylinder so I could hear it. He had the gun. I didn’t have to worry about the gun featuring in one of Robin’s stunts. I didn’t have to worry that he would do something that couldn’t be undone.

“Yeah. You boys try and top that! Can’t do it in this day and age, can you?”

“I guess not, Les,” I said. I was tempted to bring up the fact that his son had discovered some kind of portal to the seventh dimension or whatever, but I figured that would extend our conversation a bit too much for my taste.

“Listen, it’s been good talking to you. You tell that fruit of my loins to call his old man sometime, you hear?”

Robin never, ever called his parents.

“Sure thing, Les,” I said. Then I hung up.

That night, You Can’t Take It with You ended after two weekends. The performances had been unremarkable, although on the last night during the big fireworks cue that was normally just a taped sound effect, Robin set off a package of firecrackers backstage.

Afterwards I found him in the scene shop.

“Is Lucinda pissed about the firecrackers?” he asked.

“No, everyone thought it was funny.”

Robin nodded.

“Come here, let me show you this,” he said.

He lifted a tarp off of his latest creation. It was a wooden ladder.

“It’s a ladder,” I said. “You know, we’ve already got plenty of ladders around here.”

“Watch this,” he said.

Robin lifted the ladder up so that it was vertical, then flicked out two support legs. It looked very lightweight considering that it was made of wood. When he sat it down again, it became a staircase held up by the supports. He had painted it silver, but he had added flames running down the stringers. At the top where it hinged together were two pieces of wood that looked like shepherd’s crooks.

“That’s to hook over the crossbar,” Robin said. Then he bent down to the bottom step of the stairs. A coil of rope sat at the bottom, and I saw that it was actually attached to the wood, looped through two holes in the step and then tied off.

“And this is the lifeline,” he said, hefting the rope.

“Are you going to try this out?” I asked.

“I thought you should go first. You’re the one who believes in it.”

Lucinda came in, completely ignoring Robin’s latest construction, and told us that it was time to strike the set. Everyone else had gone to Dr. Newton’s house for the cast party, so the task fell to the three of us. Robin was as good at dismantling things as he was at constructing them, so the work went quickly. We broke down the flats and stacked them up against one wall of the scene shop. We carted the furniture downstairs to the big room underneath the stage that was now used for storage. We pulled all the precious jewel-colored gels out of the lights and stored them in a filing cabinet. Then we were done, and the stage was empty.

“Do you want to go to Newton’s house,” I asked, “or just go to The Breakfast Place?”

Lucinda knew one of the waiters there, so half the time we ate for free.

“Wait a sec, there’s one more thing,” Lucinda said, then she dashed across the stage and downstairs, her clogs rapping against the floor. I could hear her rummaging as Robin and I milled around.

The stage floor made a creaking sound, and then the trapdoor popped up.

“Give me a hand with this,” Lucinda said, and Robin and I lifted the door off of her head and set it aside. She was standing on a stepladder directly underneath the trapdoor. The door wasn’t hinged to the stage; it was just a big square of flooring edged in steel. Lucinda climbed up the last steps of the ladder until she was balanced on the top step. Then she pulled herself up onto the stage, just like getting out of a swimming pool.

Lucinda had us sit in a circle around the trapdoor, holding hands.

“Houdini, who art in oblivion, Harry be thy name,” she said. “Baptize us, through this, your holy trapdoor.”

“I’m pretty sure Houdini was Jewish,” I said. “No baptizing. No holy trapdoors, either.”

“Also, he didn’t believe in the afterlife,” Robin said.

Lucinda didn’t say anything. She had a really strong grip.

“Harry, bless these poor souls with your divine knowledge,” she said.

She asked if I had any requests of Houdini, and I said it would be nice if he helped me pass my Introduction to Probability class. Instead Lucinda called on Houdini to give me courage, then she let go of my hand and gestured to the opening. I stuck my legs through and pawed at the ladder. It teetered a bit, but I steadied myself on the lip of the opening and then climbed down slowly. I hesitated before letting go of the stage to bend down and clutch the ladder. It’s not like it was that high up—the room below the stage was normal-sized, and I’d been up much higher when I was helping Lucinda hang lights. But it felt odd to walk down a ladder I’d never climbed up.

“Be careful, Robin,” I said, once I was safely off the ladder. “There’s a sharp edge on the rim of that top step. You shouldn’t bleed all over Houdini’s holy space.”

Then she sent him down, calling on Houdini to give him wisdom. At first he didn’t want to go through the trapdoor. Lucinda’s hand appeared in the opening, finger pointing, and she said: “The power of Houdini compels you, the power of Houdini compels you,” over and over until her pointing hand was replaced with Robin’s sneaker-shod foot searching for the top of the ladder. I braced the ladder while he climbed down.

“Courage, brains, I guess that leaves heart for me,” Lucinda said.

Then she blessed herself and descended, bouncing down the rungs nimbly. When her feet hit the floor, she said: “There. From this moment on, our lives are going to be a lot better.”

Robin said, “Can we go to the party now?”

Newton lived near campus but Lucinda drove us over there anyway. The party had settled into two camps: the students who genuinely cared about theater were in the kitchen with Newton; the others who just liked the fact that Newton had two ice chests full of beer were out in the living room.

Robin got a beer and crammed himself onto one of the living room couches. I recognized the look on his face. He looked truly attentive, as if he cared about the video game being enthusiastically described by the guy who’d played Tony. Robin was waiting to pull a stunt, for his turn in the spotlight. I knew I should’ve stayed out there, but Lucinda grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into the kitchen. That’s where Newton was talking about the demonstrations in China, and how important they were, and how we should all read the paper every day so we’d know what was happening in the world.

Robin read the paper every chance he got, but it didn’t seem to help him much.

When I went for my second beer, Robin was in charge. He was doing the quarter trick. He could balance a column of quarters on his elbow and then flip his hand down and catch the entire stack. Not just one or two; one night in our room he caught a stack of twenty-five quarters. He had taken up a collection and was going for twenty-one. The video game nut was helping him stack them up.

Back in the kitchen, folks were talking about Panama. I knew there was a canal there, but it’s not like I could point to Panama if you showed me a map of the world. Finally the conversation circled back around to the next play that we were producing.

“Pericles,” Dr. Newton said. “Of course, we always cut Shakespeare down from five acts to two, which is tricky. Perhaps your friend will help us—we’ll need to build a ship we can sink three times a night.”

From the living room came a jangly, rattling sound. Probably one of the actors who thought that catching twenty-one quarters stacked up on your forearm was an easy feat. Newton rushed out to see what was going on and we followed. Robin was the culprit, of course. I helped him pick up all the quarters and redistribute them. I didn’t see any permanent damage.

“I’m losing my touch,” he said, crawling on the floor next to me.

“How many beers have you had?”

“Why are you counting? Only losers count. Five, I think. Can you believe that some of these actors don’t know how to shotgun a beer?”

Newton was back in the kitchen and I had convinced Robin to go apologize. He said he was sorry, and blamed the accident on his infected hand. Newton laughed it off and joked with him about designing the ship that they could sink onstage. Robin listened and then asked questions about how big the ship needed to be, and how many actors it needed to hold. So everything was all patched up right until Robin spotted the bottle of 151-proof rum on top of the refrigerator. High proof rum is an essential component of the fire trick.

“Hey, has anybody got a lighter?” he asked.

“No, Robin—”

“I’ll do it outside, it’ll be fun!”

And so, because Dr. Newton wanted to be one of the gang instead of an aloof authority figure, we ended up on the back deck with Robin, who had the bottle of rum in one hand and the lighter in the other. I had insisted that he face the yard, while the rest of us stood in a semicircle behind him.

“The key,” he said, “is to create a fine mist.”

Robin took a mouthful of alcohol and then flicked the lighter. That’s about when Lucinda slipped her hand into mine. Not the death grip, just a playful squeeze. She leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“Feeling courageous?” she asked.

Maybe he saw that movement out of the corner of his eye and couldn’t help but look. Robin’s head turned a bit towards me and Lucinda just as he held up the lighter to his pursed lips and spat out a cloud of fire. It was pretty spectacular. It always was. And this time, despite precautions, he had set my hair on fire.

I don’t think of myself as a brave person, but I don’t recall flinching. I realized that I was on fire, and an instant later, Lucinda was clapping her hand against my head to put it out. Newton went to get some burn ointment, which I didn’t need, and all the other students evacuated to escape the smell. It was just me, and Lucinda, and Robin.

And I’m definitely not a violent person, so I can’t recall thinking about it before my right hand flashed up and punched Robin in the nose. It was the first and only time I’ve ever hit anyone.

Blood began to spill from his nostrils and down over his mouth and chin. He wiped at it with one hand, then took a swig of rum from the bottle.

“I’m sorry,” Robin said, then he gasped as the strength of the rum hit him.

I believed him, and I wish I had said something. Instead, we left him there. I went home with Lucinda—the woman at the other end of the telescope.

She laughed for much of the rest of the night, which would’ve been disheartening except she kept reminding me of how cute I was, but also funny-looking because half my hair was burned off.

I walked back to campus as the sun was coming up. The world was a very different place at sunrise and I was a different person. A lot happier, at least when I thought about Lucinda. Empty streets, except for this one jogger that blazed past me. Birds calling out to each other, wind in the trees. The door to our dorm building, supposed to be locked after dark, was propped open as usual.

I entered our room as quietly as I could. By the time I got the door locked behind me, though, I knew Robin wasn’t there. The window was open, and the drawbridge was down. I checked his side of the loft, just to make sure. He was gone.

I looked out the window into the silver stadium, and saw the ladder he had built. It was sitting in front of the goalposts, its crooks locked on to the ivy-covered crossbar.

I ran down to the field. The lifeline sat coiled neatly at the bottom of the steps. It was easy to picture him at the top of the ladder, hoisting himself up onto the goalpost. Sitting astride it, and then falling away. Robin had cut himself at one point, probably another splinter, because the ladder was smeared and tracked with his blood. The top step bore the imprint, in red, of one of his size 12 Converse All Stars. I picked up the end of the lifeline and started climbing. When I got to the top, I could see the crossbar itself streaked with blood underneath the ivy. I pulled myself up, just as he had done, turning to sit there.

I looked back out at the field, and up to our room. There, in the window, the first rays of the sun glinted off the fat eye of Robin’s telescope. After all the giving and the helping and the standing-by I had done, I still felt like I owed him something. I had to go bring him back. I looped the lifeline around my waist and tied a bowline knot. Then I turned, and went through the uprights.

And out, and down, and onto the ground behind them. I managed to flip over in the air, purely by chance and not by any acrobatic skill, so that I landed flat on my back. The rope got tangled up and I ended up pulling the ladder over the crossbar too. The rope’s momentum made the ladder travel further, so it missed crashing into me by a few feet. The shock of the fall was slow to translate into physical pain. I lay there, looking up at the goalposts, looking over at the theater.

I tried not to think about Robin, so I thought about Houdini instead. All the things he could do—the escapes, the magic, the daredevil stunts in the water and in the air. I’m sure that Houdini could’ve kicked a field goal on the first try, no problem. (Later I would discover that he hadn’t actually played the Bryce Theater. It had been his brother Theo who toured as Hardeen, doing all of the same tricks as Houdini, who’d traveled through that trapdoor.) After I had lain there for an hour or so, the world coming to life around me, I slipped out of the rope and tried to get up. I hurt, but I didn’t think I’d broken any bones. It felt like my entire back half was one big bruise. I shambled up to the dorm and into the room. I still had some pain pills left from my Achilles tendon injury, and I planned on using them, after I finished some business.

First I pulled up the drawbridge, for the last time. I made my way up Robin’s spiral stairs, slowly. I got his two books and the copy of Penthouse. There was also a stack of paper lying on his bed: plans for a ship that could sink onstage. The plans were extremely detailed, and he had included a complete bill of materials needed. He must’ve been up all night working on them. I left the plans on the bed. I thought about calling Lucinda, but didn’t. That could wait. This was between me and Robin.

I walked out of the dorm, taking the stairs this time. Back on the field, I folded up Robin’s ladder and dragged it into the viney underbrush. I stood out there in front of the goalpost and tossed up Catcher in the Rye. It didn’t fly high enough the first time, so I retrieved it and gave it a brisker throw. It sailed up and over and was gone. Catch-22, the same. The porno magazine was more difficult, an ungainly bird attempting flight. Finally I spun it like a Frisbee and it sailed through, its pages flapping and waving goodbye.

I kept the telescope.

Richard Butner runs the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference. Small Beer Press published his chapbook, Horses Blow Up Dog City and Other Stories. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, the City of Oaks.

“The Empire Never Ended” by Brian Trent

JohnK — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:00:14 +0000

Glabrio knelt at the shoreline, washing his bearded face in the wine-dark sea, when he heard the enemy skyship give one final groan. Two hundred yards away the metallic red hulk was still smoking, half-submerged in the Mediterranean like an unsightly island, one wing jutting to the heavens, the forked tail like a wishbone. Then it tilted over and the waters shot up in spectacular foam.

“There it goes!” Glabrio cried, clapping his hands together at the sight of the vessel vanishing into the wake. He gave a savage grin to his wounded friend. “May Lord Neptune eat well today!”

Behind him, Sun Pin nodded thoughtfully at the milky ripples. His skin had turned a ghastly clay color, a far cry from the healthy golden glow he had sported when they left the red-lacquered courts of Xianyang. The bandages of his pulverized leg needed changing. Bald, tunic-clad, he looked like a mosaic from the old Roman bridge that led to the city necropolis.

“How much time to the train pass?” he managed weakly.

Glabrio stood on trembling yet muscular legs. Face washed, he caught a glimpse of his own dark reflection. An old story from childhood floated like flute notes from his memory. Turn your eyes upon dark glass, the story said, and see neither the past nor future, but what might be.

The problem was that he didn’t know how to read his troubled, anxious face in those waters. His watery doppelganger watched him with strangely pleading eyes.

“What did you say?” Glabrio asked, turning back to his friend.

“The train. When’s the next arrival?”

Glabrio retrieved his scroll from his pocket. He snapped it open, and his dexterous thumbs rotated the tabs to transform its surface into a timetable map. The Alexandros train line materialized. It ran the coast from Old Carthage to the inland ports hugging the Nile, all the way to the little island of Elephantine.

His eyes scanned the timetable. Then he looked to the kronoband all soldiers wore around their wrists. A tiny crimson serpent crawled around its surface, passing into each respective hour of the day.

Glabrio looked at Sun Pin in thinly constrained despair. “Fourteen minutes.”

Sun Pin sighed. His lean body inflated in a strange celebration of life. With this breath I am alive! it seemed to say, and when he exhaled the illusion shrank. He was at Pluto’s grey door . . . but perhaps had not yet rung the bell.

“Tell me again how lovely the Nile is?”

“I told you before. There are no words. You have to see it.” Glabrio lifted the other man to his feet, quickly strapping the two-inch pattens to both feet. “And Elephantine has honey-skinned women with eyes outlined in black kohl, and they are as sleek as cats. Their lips taste like sugar-dipped plums.”

Sun Pin leaned his bald head back to the sky, just in time to acknowledge a new peal of thunder. Rain splashed into neat star-patterns on his sweaty forehead. “If not for the war,” he breathed, “then for the sleek cats of Old Egypt! Let’s go!”

They hobbled away from the shoreline barricade, which had been their only shield against the Tlaxcalan skyship—until the jupiterhand’s strike. The red vessel had circled them like an angry hornet, strafing the barricade of wood and scrap metal. Glabrio had hastily loaded a missile into the jupiterhand’s cylinder, and it was Sun Pin who peeked out, placing the enemy into his sights. An instant later, the missile had streaked up on a pillar of blue propellant and split the ship like a gutted fish.

“Hurry!” The pattens creaked, equalizing Sun Pin’s wounded leg. The soldiers briskly pushed up from the muddying beach to sturdier inland, where the port was a tangled mass of Egyptian resistance ruins. Fourteen minutes! Even for a robust athlete it would be a challenge. And they were further burdened by Glabrio’s metallic case, heavy, troublesome, but the very thing the Tlaxcala wanted so badly.

Maybe that was the answer in the dark glass. What the future would be like, if the enemy got their hands on what was in his possession.

Glabrio’s heart squeezed painfully. His fingers tightened their hold on the metal case in response, and he was flooded with a dizzying adrenaline rush. He suddenly saw himself as from a bird’s viewpoint, looking no more significant than an ant crawling on his villa’s mosaic paths. What was the significance of an ant? Crushed easily beneath a sandal’s careless step! And yet, the Fates had all the future weighing on this ant’s shoulders. . . the tormented cries of a thousand future souls howling, phantom-like, around him. Glabrio’s optimism faltered in this cosmic vise-grip. His lean, sinewy body constricted as if trapped in the coils of Python himself.

From beyond the port’s ruins came the blast of the train. The Tlaxcala were famed for bombing cities into total oblivion, with no regard for history or the future. Indeed, changing the world into rubble seemed their ultimate objective—a horizon of shattered glass and fractured pylons.

A troop of baboons were picking through the remains of what may have been a grocer shop, rudely pawing foodstuffs into their mouths. Glabrio glared in disgust at the animals, having too often come upon them gnawing on human corpses. No one knew how, but the beasts now ranged far from their native jungles and Glabrio’s hatred of them grew every time he saw them in a new place.

In the distance, the train suddenly appeared like a fabled sea serpent. Bright green, with engraved scales and Roman emblems glinting on its flanks. Driven by the power of steam.

“I can’t help but thinking this is all your fault,” Sun Pin panted as he went.

“Tell me when we’re on the train,” Glabrio said. The train would pass far ahead of them in just a few minutes; they could already see the tracks cutting through the rubble. Glabrio dropped his metal case and fled from his friend’s side. He leapt onto the tracks.

“What are you doing?” Sun Pin cried, aghast.

Glabrio seized the nearest block of rubble and strained against it, rolling it onto one ungainly side. In half a minute he had set the monstrosity onto the tracks, and he clambered to get another. The ground was trembling now as the train approached.

He never even heard the shot. All he knew was that, struggling to set the second obstruction in place, it seemed that someone with a mighty sledgehammer had swung into his shoulder, spinning him around like a top. He was suddenly facing the forest opposite the Mediterranean. Then that invisible sledgehammer hit him again, in the chest, and Glabrio fell backwards upon the tracks. The locket he always wore slid up into the crease of his neck.

Tlaxcalan snipers! he thought, lying motionless. They’d sit there and wait, itching for his partner to try to rescue him.

Glabrio’s mind raced. What to do? His handgun was within reach, but about as helpful right now as a slingshot. His own gun lay back with Sun Pin, as did the jupiterhand.

The tracks vibrated enough to rattle his teeth. His locket chain jingled musically in the rain.

Glabrio realized in an instant that he didn’t want to die. Years of facing death in service of the Empire had not, amazingly enough, led him to accept his mortality. How many times had he faced Pluto’s grey door? His life often seemed a collection of explosions and shrapnel, while his memories of Rome were just a dream. In that dream was a marble villa, and his two daughters were playing in the gardens, and he would scoop them up in his arms and carry them inside to watch a favorite helioramic together.

An image roared fleetingly through his thoughts. Little Prisca, his youngest, standing at the ivy-strewn doorway of their home, waiting for the father who would never return.

No!

He tensed his muscles, ready to leap up and risk more sniper fire. Again the image of his reflected face drifted into his thoughts, sorrowful, anguished, and with something else in his eyes. Glinting like polished river stones. What was it?

Then he heard the distinctive whine of the jupiterhand. The rocket streaked past him, into the woods, and exploded against the trees as a dazzling fireball. Glabrio scrambled off the tracks in the interim. Sun Pin was already moving to meet him, the metal case in one hand, the jupiterhand cylinder gently smoking against his shoulder.

They heard the squealing of the train wheels, as the conductor spotted the obstructions on the tracks. Glabrio smiled as it drew itself like a green wall in front of the sniper-studded forest. He tugged at Sun Pin, and they hobbled to the closest boxcar, climbing inside.

It took less than two minutes for the train’s soldiers to remove the rubble from the tracks. The crackling forest was quiet.

Safely aboard the train, Glabrio approached a uniformed guard and flashed his military badge. He was ushered in past the gawking passengers to a secluded booth adjacent to the baggage car, where he and Sun Pin collapsed. The Egyptian landscape flew by their window.

He quickly changed Sun Pin’s bandages, rubbing in the antibiotics to stave off infection. His partner turned an even paler shade from the pain, but refused the painkillers.

“Stubborn fool,” Glabrio said wearily, secretly admiring his Oriental friend’s iron-like resolve. It was an inspiration, really. Two years ago while on campaign in Gaul, Glabrio had been shot by steel-tipped dragon teeth. Sun Pin and a local doctor worked to remove the slugs, while Glabrio ground his teeth and tried to match Sun Pin’s tireless example of Han dynasty stoicism. The Hans were better at it than the damned Greeks.

Finished now, Glabrio flopped into the seat across from him. “So how is this all my fault?”

Sun Pin raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Out there, you said this whole thing was my fault. By which I assume you mean the fact that we’re at war, are constantly being shot at, and will likely die a terrible death before we ever see peace.”

Sun Pin nodded. “If your Alexander the Great had just stayed in his part of the world, we wouldn’t be hunted like we are now.”

“Alexander was Greek. I’m a Roman.”

“So argued the chicken and duck, as to who was a bird.” Sun Pin took a hearty swig from his field water jug. “Alexander must have been a devil. How many times was he almost killed?”

Glabrio looked away from the rushing landscape. Night was turning the windows black, and again there was his reflection, mute and unhelpful.

“Lots of times. A Persian struck him on the head with an axe at the Granicus River, and he recovered. Later, he nearly died during the desert march through Gedrosia. And then at Babylon, he struggled for two weeks against a relentless fever, but beat it. That last episode should have killed him, by all rights.” He shrugged, jerking toward the window as he thought his reflection flashed a knowing smile. “Willpower. Alexander recovered and lived to the ripe age of eighty-three.”

“A devil,” Sun Pin repeated, but he smiled at the old joke. There was much to admire in Sun Pin’s strength of spirit. Sun Pin came from the Shaanxi school of Zhong Guo’s philosophers, which had sprung up in the centuries after West and East were brought into contact by Alexander’s eastern marches. Forever obsessed with the exotic kingdoms he found there, Alexander was the one who ordered construction of the longest road in history—the Great Route—facilitating an explosion of trade like nothing history had ever seen before. And centuries later when the Romans annexed Alexander’s empire, the Great Route became more important than ever; Greek rulers had seen fit to adapt the steam engine proposals of Heron of Alexandria to its surface. The trains had been running ever since.

So in a way, Sun Pin owed his very existence to those bygone battles and eventual cross-pollination of cultures. And certainly the world had benefited from that intercourse of powerful empires.

Glabrio snapped open his scroll again, and clicked through the different combinations of pages. His thumb flicked the tabs, moving and retracting the scroll-plate. Maps appeared and vanished, mission instructions, first aid, information on the local flora and fauna, and even a litany of local contacts sympathetic to the cause. The best part was that it could only be read with the right key, and Glabrio carried it: made of a ceramic which could be smashed into dust with one throw should their enemies capture them.

The Tlaxcala had, long ago, been little more than scattered tribes, the lost peoples rejected by the high civilizations of Rome and Zhong Guo: the Huns and Goths and Celts and Norse. Unable to overcome the continent-spanning Great Wall which ran from Zhong Guo’s eastern shores across the crest of Italy, the wretches had been faced with two options. Some settled down and made small, warlike states in Europe’s chilly hinterlands. Others moved across the eastern sea to the Far Continents. There, they encountered a strange multitude of tribal peoples: strangers who dressed in feathers, shells, and deerskins. They gazed in wonder at this vast new land of open plains, forests, and the untouched ores of mountains from which to set up new forges and altars to their thunder gods.

Blood altars.

And when the new weapons had cooled, the bearded warriors gathered into gleeful hunting parties and made Valhalla on Earth.

Few in the West realized what was happening on the opposite side of the world. They had knowledge of the new continents, of course; Greek explorers had mapped their coastlines, made tentative contact with the natives, and moved on, thinking them a quaint curiosity. They never penetrated the interiors. They never cut a swath of death through tribal territories, encountering people calling themselves Fox, Sioux, Apache . . .

Tenochca.

When Sun Pin was asleep, Glabrio ambled along the train’s length to find the conductor. Egyptian night pressed at the windows. Most passengers slept, while some older men read books by glowlights, and a few children played hide-and-seek among the boxcar seats.

“I need to send a message to Elephantine,” Glabrio told the conductor.

The man was white-haired, clean-shaven, and badly scarred. One side of his head was bubbly and burnt, unsightly with dark scar tissue as were his hands. He had grey eyes, wide and moist. “You may, of course. You’re the soldier, right?”

Glabrio glared. “Just lead the way.”

The wireless transmitter was in the comcar behind the cabin. Glabrio thanked the conductor, and began tapping out a coded message to his compatriots awaiting him on the Nile island.

Sun Pin is gravely injured. We have the prize and are en route to you.

He hesitated, feeling his anxious heart skip a beat. It was a terrible feeling. The blood rushed to his head, his panicked pulse twitched in his neck.

“May I ask,” said the conductor behind him, “why you are going to Elephantine?”

Glabrio spun around, frightened and angry. “I asked for privacy!” His instincts kicked in, and he whirled the old man around, slamming him into the wall. He padded him down, seeking daggers or pistols.

“What’s your name?”

“Silus,” the conductor panted. “I meant no offense.”

“Good. Then get the hell out of here.”

The conductor nodded, head low like a broken-down horse. He turned towards the doorway, halted, and tilted his head at Glabrio.

“I only asked if you were a soldier because. . . well. . . I was one too. Long ago. Before your father was born, I’m sure.”

Glabrio felt his senses go on full alert, suspecting treachery. “That’s fascinating. It isn’t like soldiers are in short supply.”

“I wasn’t saying this to fascinate you,” Silus said, his voice growing firmer. “Younger soldiers can often benefit from a veteran’s advice. Like the importance of not turning your back on me when we entered this room. I could have been a Tlaxcalan agent, with this train line under my control.”

Glabrio started to reply with a sharp comment when he faltered, suddenly perceiving the reasons for the scars on the man’s face and hands.

Silus retrieved a small flask from his pocket. “Drink?”

Glabrio regarded the flask. “A Tlaxcalan agent just might poison it.”

Silus smiled so that all the wrinkles in his face appeared and stretched. He looked like a tribal mask of mirth. “Like I said.”

Empire historians put the time of contact between Eurasian invaders and the Tenochcas at around 900 years after Alexander. While Sino-Roman civilization was flourishing, descendants of the Norse and Goths and Huns finally crossed into the southernmost of the Far Continents. Here they saw the cities of Texcoco and Tenochtitlan, pyramids of sun and moon, and priests who plucked hearts from sacrificial victims.

Here was an enemy they could not conquer. So they traded together, learning each other’s tongues and gods. Was thunder god Odin so very different from Tlaloc? The trade prospered, and marriages were made. Young men of the Norse, Goths, and Huns willingly joined the military schools of Eagle and Jaguar and Feathered Serpent.

Inventions of the west kept coming through the sea trades with their European neighbors. The Sino-Roman Empire had by now connected themselves through trains and skyships, and their laboratories churned out complex discoveries in medicine, engineering, and physics. What man could imagine, so the wisdom of an era cried, man could achieve.

And in the Far West, the schools of Eagle, Jaguar, and Feathered Serpent spread north. We are the Tlaxcala, children of the death god! All shall submit or die! Gunpowder and the secret of flight snuck across the ocean, and became the lifeblood of the Tlaxcalan Empire. Both Far Continents were brought under their sway within as many centuries. All shall submit or die! Tlaxcalan princes were given huge swaths of land to own, develop, and refine into ever better cogs of the conquest machine. All shall submit or die!

The same year the Sino-Roman Empire cured cancer, the Tlaxcalans came.

All shall submit or die!

Glabrio rarely took his locket off. His fingers fumbled to open it; he was shaking. Then the golden circle opened, and there was a perfect capture of Prisca, his youngest. Her face was fat and cherubic, cheeks like red circles. Glabrio turned a knob and the picture shifted, much like his scroll, to show his oldest, Cincinnata, lean and dark, an impish glimmer in her youthful eyes. Another turn of the knob and his stunning wife Veta was there. Her face was aged beyond her years, but she stole his breath to look at her again.

Silus took the locket gently, showing appreciation for its antiquity and the pictures that looked out at him.

“Like spring flowers,” Silus said.

“I’ll give them the world if I can,” Glabrio offered.

“You’re young,” Silus said without any malice. “At your age, it’s possible to believe in such things.”

They stood at opposite ends of the cabin, facing each other. The Egyptian landscape, lush and flowering along the starlit Nile, raced by the windows.

“Then I hope I don’t grow up to be such a cynic as you,” Glabrio quipped.

This brought a real chuckle to the old man. “When I was six, the Tlaxcala bombed my family’s village.”

Glabrio looked again to the bumpy scars on the other man’s face and hands.

“No,” Silus said, “I lived through those bombings without a scratch. These ugly things —” he tapped at his deformities— “came later, when I was a few years younger than you. My ship was shot down over Kiev.”

“You were a pilot?” Glabrio asked, startled.

“A modern Icarus.”

“Did you . . . how many enemy ships did you destroy?”

“Not sure. It’s not like the helioramics you kids watch, with exciting plots and illusions to make you think air battles are romantic!”

“What is it like, then?”

Silus looked to the ceiling, scratching his chin with his ruined hand. “You suddenly live in the moment like at no other time of life. Up there in the blue sky, you become pure reflex and reaction. See an enemy! Shoot it! Skyships coming at you? Evade, pull into a cloud, loop around, get the devils from behind. Drop some flash fire on their main vessels. Then the adrenaline thins out in your blood, and you start to realize that it’s over, you’re alive, and you don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You weren’t counting on surviving. It’s a surprise. Zeus sits on your shoulder maybe.” He stopped, reading the flicker in Glabrio’s eyes. “Or maybe you don’t believe in the gods. So it’s chance, combined with reflex and quick thinking. But you find yourself in a bit of daze.”

“It’s different for me,” Glabrio said. “I see my enemy up close. And I always know what to do afterwards.”

“And that is?”

“Get back to my family.” He was startled by how quickly his eyes welled up. “To see my little girls and my wife again.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.” Glabrio wiped away sudden tears as he took his locket back. “I want them to live. . . without fear. You know?”

The old man patted the soldier’s arm affectionately. “I do. And I thank you for what you’ve done so far.”

“I thank you,” Glabrio said. “If not for Icaruses like yourself, the sky would be filled with Tlaxcalan birds.”

“More for you to shoot down,” the conductor said. “Yes, your friend told me how the two of you knocked that skyship with your jupiterhand. The weapons of today!” Silus shook his head.

“It isn’t like Sun Pin to brag.”

“Oh, he wasn’t. I could still smell the powder on the weapon, and asked him to indulge an old bird like me. The man has a great way with words. All Orientals I’ve known are like that. You ever been to Beijing or Xi’an?”

“No. But Sun Pin and I have an agreement: When this war is over, I’ll bring my family to see his. If it’s half as beautiful as I hear, I might move there permanently.”

The old man nodded. “Zhong Guo rivals the beauty of Rome, so I hear. Green hills, red-lacquered cities, sampan villages with friendly merchants peddling anything you could want. ”

Glabrio put his locket back on. The hidden pictures rested comfortably against his heart.

“Apollo keep you,” he said, turning to leave.

“What about that case the two of you are guarding so well?”

Glabrio stopped. “The case?”

“The metallic case you came aboard with. The one that looks far heavier than it should be. Shouldn’t it be put in a safer place?”

Glabrio felt his paranoia rise. But before he could say anything, the old conductor leaned closer and said, “The rings of Pluto.”

The train pressed on across the night. After his talk with the conductor, Glabrio promptly went to sleep and, for the first time in weeks, enjoyed deep dreamless slumber. He left the shades open so the brightening eastern sky would awaken him.

Dawn touched their faces with soft golden light. Glabrio awoke groggily. He checked on Sun Pin’s bandages again, and walked to the dining car to get some tea. Along the way he checked his kronoband. Only soldiers needed such precise timekeeping mechanisms. To Glabrio, it was like a slave collar, and he sought the day he could tear it off and never worry about the meticulous crawl of life.

The train slowed, wheels moaning.

“Thanks,” Glabrio told the server, and brought a tray of two steaming cups back to his car. Sun Pin woke as he entered. He stretched, looking sweaty and smelling in need of a shower. The train stopped. Glabrio looked at the station platform and let a smile play at his lips.

“Hephaestus.” He tapped his scroll-plate. The surface transformed into a map. “Next stop, Elephantine.” He stretched and yawned, his fingers brushed the ceiling.

Then Sun Pin touched his elbow. Glabrio turned, and saw his compatriot pointing grimly to the platform.

At first Glabrio didn’t see it. There were morning commuters gathered, mostly brown-skinned citizens in pale togas. Two leashed monkeys were fighting over a toy.

Then it hit him.

Just beyond the station was the main road, and three military trucks were parked there. Dusty troop transports with the red claw of Tlaxcala emblazoned on their sides.

Glabrio looked with renewed eyes at the commuters. As he watched, red-and-black uniformed soldiers emerged from the station, rifles in their hands. They began boarding the train.

Sun Pin tugged at his arm. “Do you see that pretty young thing on the platform? The one with curves like an Etruscan statue, and skin like warmed honey?”

Glabrio followed his friend’s stare. He nodded.

“Is that an Egyptian woman?”

“Yes.” The word was barely a whisper.

Sun Pin sighed deeply. “Beautiful.” His fingers began undoing something from the hem of his tunic. Helplessly, Glabrio watched as his friend dislodged a small case holding a round, white pebble.

“Don’t,” Glabrio pleaded. His eyes watered. “We can figure something out. We. . .”

“There is an expression from Mencius, my favorite of Zhong Guo’s philosophers. But I. . . I cannot abide by it. Mencius. . . did not know. . . the Tlaxcala.”

Tears spilled from Glabrio’s eyes. “My daughters have never seen your homeland.”

Sun Pin nodded gravely. “Then they will have to without me. Good-bye, my friend.”

He swallowed the pebble.

The train’s soldiers surrendered so easily, without so much as a hint of protest, that Glabrio wondered if they had been bribed from the very beginning. Some arrangement must have been made; it was tradition to fight to the bitter end against Tlaxcalans. And why not? The enemy reveled in torturing captives. Skinning them alive, performing surgery while the victim remained conscious. . .

The enemy troops boarded the train swiftly, combing its length for something.

“You found me,” Glabrio told them. They dragged him to their commander at the platform. Now he could see it was even worse than he had imagined. Two red skyships had landed farther past the station. Enemy troops were walking openly among the people here. How much of Egypt had fallen? And how?

For all the ferocity of their sustained invasions, the Tlaxcala were losing their navy due to the Empire’s supremacy of the oceans. And if they still had an air advantage, that was steadily changing too. Empire skyfleets were finally taking the fight to the enemy’s homelands.

Glabrio was brought before a short, ruddy man dressed in an impeccable black-and-red suit. The colors of smoke and fire, so the Empire joke went.

The Tlaxcalan commander gazed sharply at him. Glabrio held his stare.

“Where is the case you were delivering?”

“I ate it.”

The commander didn’t look away from him. To his men he yelled, “Rip that train apart, top to bottom!”

A minute passed in silence. Then, from one of the windows, “Sir? His partner is dead. There’s no sign of the case. We do have his scroll, though.”

Glabrio laughed. “Good luck with that.”

“Did you eat the key, too?”

“No. I smashed it on the floor of the train before coming out to have this lovely conversation with you.”

The ruddy man sighed, fanning himself in the uncomfortable Egyptian heat. “Our interrogators will really want to talk to you. We have legendary ways of extracting information from our enemies.”

“So I’m told,” Glabrio said, propping up his courage as best he could. “Fortunately, I don’t know a gods-cursed thing. But realize that for every drop of my blood that spills, that’s one of your compatriots I personally killed in this war.”

The commander slapped him across the face with his ringed hand. Two cuts opened instantly.

Glabrio grinned savagely. “Start counting.”

Yes, he thought as they dragged him into one of their trucks. Start counting the days to the end of this war. Two-thirds of the world is against you, and all you’ve done is unite us. The Empire will never end.

“‘I dislike death indeed,’” Glabrio quoted, his necklace clutched tightly in his shaking hands, “‘But there are things I dislike more than death. Therefore there are occasions in which I will not avoid danger.’”

He spent the duration of the truck ride hoping that whatever was in the delivery case was worth it.

“You didn’t open it, did you?” the scientist asked, taking the case from the young merchant’s hands and peering skeptically at its battered condition.

“Of course not!” the boy said sullenly. “They all told me it was some kind of poison. You gonna poison all the Tlaxcala’s food and water?”

The scientist stared hard at the boy beneath his bushy eyebrows. “You don’t understand. This . . . poison could render food and water unsafe. But that’s not what we’re using it for. It’s a secret ingredient in a very special bomb we’re making.”

This won over the boy’s interest. His eyes grew wide. “A bomb?”

A bomb as bright as ten thousand suns, the scientist thought. A bomb to level cities as if harnessing the destructive radiance of Jupiter himself. He stared at the shiny case exterior. Within, the Ring of Pluto waited in silent, radioactive anticipation.

The conductor had revealed himself to be Glabrio’s Empire contact, and the case had transferred owners. Now the case would change again, from the conductor to the boy. The boy would take the case to the scientists of the Empire. Then there would be a flight to a secret laboratory in Rome.

“Come along now,” the scientist told the boy. “We’re leaving Egypt.”

The boy blinked. “I’m going too?”

We can’t leave you here, the scientist thought. “Yes. You ever see Rome before?”

The boy shook his head.

Together, they quickly boarded the black skyship. In minutes, they were airborne. Out the observation deck window, the sun was setting in the west.

Notes from the author:

The Empire Never Ended occurred to me while I was giving a public lecture on ancient history. The subject was Alexander the Great, and I wondered aloud how history might have played differently had he lived past that fateful night in Babylon. After all, he was obsessed with exploring the Far East; what if he brought Hellenistic culture into contact with China? The cross-pollination of ideas and inventions (the Chinese had wood-block printing, which might have allowed the Great Library of Alexandria to avert its disaster of having all those priceless books in one flammable location.) This idea (along with my story Checkmate in EV Issue 21/22) completed my seduction by alternate history.

Brian Trent lives at the speed of light. A novelist, producer, journalist, and screenwriter, his work has appeared in more than 100 venues including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Humanist, UTNE, and much more. You can find him online at briantrent.com.

Content TKTK: A n00b’s Guide to Speculative Fiction Poetry by John Ottinger III

Anne — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:30:25 +0000

If you are anything at all like me, you and poetry have passed like ships in the night: Lights on, blaring your horns, and doing your able best to avoid one another. Sure, you read some poetry during your school years, but much of it was either really, really old or so new it just didn’t make any sense (I’m looking at you, e. e. cummings) to your still forming brain. Maybe you remember a few terms such as meter and rhyme, perhaps even what an iamb is, or how syllables affect our understanding of poetry—but that’s about it.

Perhaps you were one of the fortunate few who had an instructor who brought poetry alive, and who made the reading of poetry a lifelong pursuit. If so, this article is not particularly for you, though you may still enjoy it. But for those of you who remember poetry as the most annoying, exacerbating, torturous snore-fest of your school years, you might want to lift your head from your desk and pay attention.

If you are a reader of speculative fiction (you know, science fiction, fantasy, and horror type stuff) you probably read it because you enjoy it. For you, the reading of a book by Isaac Asimov or Robert Jordan is a pleasurable experience, one that you look forward to after a long day at work. Maybe you curl up in your pajamas with a coffee, or you go to the bookstore or library and enhance your experience by being surrounded by a wealth of words. Maybe you curl up in bed with only a single dim light, or sit outside on the patio drinking in the sunshine. However you do it, you find the act of reading a work of speculative fiction a pleasurable experience.

Poetry can be a pleasurable experience too, if you let it. If speculative prose is something you enjoy, there is a good chance that speculative poetry may also be to your liking. You may not find “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost to be all that exciting an event, but listening to or reading “Song for an Ancient City” by Amal El-Mohtar brings visions of the ethereal, the old, and the beautiful. To you, “Return of Zombie Teen Angst” by Mike Allen sounds like it might actually make a fun read, but an “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats sounds like the poet simply lacked imagination.

If this describes you, you are not alone.

Many, many people have allowed the possibilities of poetry in science fiction and fantasy to pass them by. For the writer, it may be perceived there is no market for their work in poetry (as we will see later, that is an erroneous belief). For the reader, a bad experience with poetry, a belief that it is only for the “intelligentsia” or “literary” or simply a lack of contact have prevented them from enjoying the wealth that is poetry.

I too, was one of those people.

So I set myself a task. I went out, learned what I could about poetry, experienced some of what is being written today in SF poetry, and compiled for myself a sort of guide to appreciating verse. My hope is that my guide will help you find beauty and entertainment in the reading of SF poetry through some practical tips, a better understanding of analysis, and some exposure to some poems in the SF genre.

WHAT IS SF POETRY?

First, some definitions. What is speculative poetry? Suzette Haden Elgin, founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, defines speculative poetry in The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook as “A science fiction poem must be about a reality that is in some way different from the existing reality.” This broad and nuanced definition can be applied as much to prose as verse. The genres of science fiction, fantasy, and even horror posit an alternative to reality as the writer and reader may understand it, and so speculative poetry does the same albeit in a unique form. Of course, not all alternate reality poetry is SF poetry.

What then makes it different from any other poetry? For the casual reader, such as me and possibly you, the best way to differentiate between SF poetry and so-called “mainstream” poetry is simply to rely on the old adage “I’ll know it when I see it”. We must be like Damon Knight, who once defined science fiction as “whatever I am pointing at when I say ‘science fiction!’” For you and me, it really doesn’t matter if the critics define a work of poetry as SF poetry or not, because if that is how we experience it, then it is so. It might be content, it might be form, it might be the similar emotional response you get from reading a poem to that which you get from reading SF prose. Of course, some poetry is specifically and intentionally SF poetry. This will usually be clear in the fact that the work is published in a genre magazine, or the author self-identifies as an SF poet, but no matter what, as with any reading experience, the reader will choose to define a poem as s/he wills. This may actually be a good opportunity for debates between appreciators to arise, something that will likely enhance your experience of poetry, not detract from it.

GETTING ACCLIMATED

Now that we have defined SF poetry by not defining it, let’s turn our attention to getting acclimated to the pleasure that can be had from reading poetry.

Like when you first learned to read, enjoying poetry is going to take a little bit of effort on your part. Whether you learned English via whole language or phonetics, you learned to read through a significant amount of effort, especially for a young brain. You pounded those words and syllables into your mind, memorizing them and their relationships, working time and time again to understand the various nuances of a given word and how context can change a world. You fought over homophones, homographs, and the multiple exceptions to plurals, verbs, and adverb use. You worked hard.

Fortunately, you won’t have to work quite so hard at enjoying SF poetry. You have already done the hard part in learning to read. Now you just need to learn the differences there are in reading poetry as opposed to prose.

Attend a Poetry Reading

Why would I put “attend a poetry reading” first in my list of acclimatizing tools? It is because often, poetry is best experienced aloud. It is very, very hard to learn to enjoy poetry in a vacuum, especially when your only contact is black letters on a white page. It is just so sterile, so utterly devoid of any feeling to read a poem in that way. When first learning to enjoy poetry, it is best to get poetry “from the horse’s mouth” as it were. Much of the poetry at a reading will be original, will be by the poet, and will be read in the cadence and tone which the author intends. Naturally, it is unlikely that much of this poetry will be of a SF variety, but the goal here is to learn that poetry has a music born of words alone. Just as the enjoyment of a play, once read, is enhanced by seeing it on stage, so too is seeing and hearing a poem performed.

Poets.org has a National Poetry Map on its website that can help you find readings in your area. Next time you go to a Barnes and Noble, check their events calendar and see if there is a poetry group or special appearance. Many of the Barnes & Noble stores where I have lived have hosted teen poetry groups. These would be good places to go, as the crowd is small, you can slip away when you like, and although the poetry may not be extremely good, the youth of the budding poets makes it easier to feel less intimidated. This is where I began, afraid that a more formal poetry reading would be too much like the atmosphere in So I Married an Axe Murder when beat poet Charlie Mackenzie (Mike Myers) reads one of his poems in a poetry bar. (Silly, I know, but lack of experience or a fear of trying new things can make fools of us all.)

If finding a poetry reading is difficult or you lack the time to commit to one, you might also try looking on YouTube or other video-sharing sites for some poetry readings. Author Neil Gaiman’s “Instructions” (http://youtu.be/bi2pBZGJqj8 ) can be found there being read by the author himself, as can work by Theodora Goss (http://youtu.be/tLSANHt9Neg) and Mike Allen, both noted SF poets. There is sure to be more various categories and/or genres that I have yet to discover.

The point here is to experience the poetry, getting a sense of it as read aloud.

Read Poetry

This is fairly self-evident. If you want to experience and understand poetry, you are going to have to read it. Fortunately there are a lot of great places to find SF poetry, not least of which is in the very pages of Electric Velocipede. The dedicated poetry magazines Dreams and Nightmares, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Star*Line, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, and Astropoetica are all excellent places to find a wealth of verse. Many of them are online magazines and offer the poetry free of charge. (An entire listing of publications which accept and print poetry can be found at: http://www.sfpoetry.com/markets.html) In some cases, print editions are available if you prefer. Thaumatrope, a Twitter zine, often includes haikus or limericks in its daily dose of mini-fictions. Asimov’s, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss &Apex, Sybil’s Garage, Ideomancer, Black Gate, and Strange Horizons are all publications which include SF poetry in and amongst works of prose and essays. And many individual authors will include poetry in their websites or blogs, such as Jim C. Hines’ series of “zombie rhymes” which are parodies of old nursery rhymes (http://www.jimchines.com/tag/zombie-rhymes/).

There are also several poetry collections and anthologies produced each year. Those links will take you to the Science Fiction Poetry Association lists that they maintain. The SFPA also releases their own anthology of the Rhysling Award winners each year. The Rhysling Award is the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s annual award for the best speculative poetry, which has been awarded since 1978.

Again, the point here is to acclimate yourself to the nuances of poetry, to learn the different styles by feel if not by specific name. You won’t be able to define which poem is a limerick, or which is written in iambic pentameter (unless, of course, you remember these details from your school days) but you will be able to enjoy the poem at an emotional level, the level of the heart. Let the mind come later, let the specifics of a particular poem’s construction not be what you first experience; rather let the beauty of the language flow over you. Bruce Boston, a multiple Rhysling award winner, illuminates my meaning:

“Speculative poetry is about suggestion; it is elusive and rich in allusions; it functions at multiple levels; it may sometimes appear opaque until you give it a deserving read. Unlike most genre poems, speculative poetry does not use language to communicate in a strictly literal way, but recognizes the analogical quality of language, the play of words, the connections and contradictions inherent in sounds and meanings. It takes words beyond themselves, beyond their literal definitions, and whether its syntax is simple or complex, rhymed and metered or free verse, it understands how to make language not only speak but sing.” (Originally in Fortean Bureau, Sept. 2005; now found at http://estranghero.blogspot.com/2008/10/just-so-people-will-know.html)

DIGGING DEEPER

Now that you have been experientially acclimated to SF poetry and know where to find it, we need to turn our minds towards understanding the poetry we have experienced with our hearts. To do so, we will need to continue to read and listen to poetry.

Read Reviews of Poetry

Find reviews of speculative poetry. Find out what the experts in the field are saying about different pieces of poetry. Reading reviews will assist you in learning to discern a “good” poem from a “bad” poem, at least in a critical sense. You will, of course, not always agree with their conclusions on a particular piece. One of the very aspects of poetry that make it so enjoyable is disagreeing with others about a particular piece. It is rarely quantifiable, and every reader will react just a little bit differently to a particular work. You can find reviews of speculative poetry at places like SF Site, Star*Line, and Illumen. The “Distillations” section of the (now-defunct but still available to read) online review magazine The Fix was one of the most comprehensive and thorough locations for reviews of SF poetry. In addition, The Fix often reviewed the publications where the poems first appeared and so it is a great place to find reviews of poetry in the broader content magazines. Tangent Online also reviews many of the publications where SF poetry can be found with excellent and thoughtful reviews.

It is just as important to read reviews of poetry as it is to read the poetry itself, as it will add to your critical understanding of a poem, perhaps illuminate some aspect of a poem you read that escaped you on first reading, and give you a better sense of where a poem might fit into history and genre. Poet Matthew Zapruder, who selects and edits much of the poetry published by Seattle’s Wave Books, was interview by Publishers Weekly in preparation for a panel on poetry reviewing. In the interview Zapruder said, “The most valuable thing about a review of a book of poetry is its potential to deepen the reader’s experience of the work under consideration.” He continues, “The thoughts and insights of a perceptive, educated, interested writer who has spent a significant amount of time with the poetry can be of great help to someone who is new to the poems.” (read the entire interview with Zapruder and his fellow panelists at the Publishers Weekly website)

Poetry Analysis

Now, before you cringe in agony, this is not your poetry analysis from school. For one thing, you probably care a great deal more about understanding poetry, or you wouldn’t have even made it this far into my column. Because poetry is a significant part of literature, there are many resources available to help you better understand poetry, from Poetry for Dummies to critical editions of the poems of Tennyson or Frost. There is a great deal out there, only a little of it dedicated to speculative poetry, but to be sure, a good understanding of the techniques and the ability to analyze a poem is a universal skill.

Analyzing a poem is much like critiquing a work of fiction. By asking yourself a set of ten questions about the work, you will be able to critique it in such a way as to enhance your enjoyment of the work. (Adapted from Brock University—Professor John Lye’s “Critical Reading: A Guide”)

1. What is the poem’s genre?

What Lye means here, is the poem a sonnet, an elegy, a lyric, a narrative, a dramatic monologue, an epic, etc.? Lye contends that identifying the form of a poem is important because “different forms are usually associated with particular subjects, aims, and attributes.” Before asking this question, be sure you are familiar with the most common types. Most of them are discussed and explained in books written for the average reader.

2. Who is the poem’s narrator?

This is what is commonly called “point of view” when analyzing prose. Lye says, “Identify the voice. What does the voice have to do with what is happening in the poem?” I particularly liked how Lye phrased his next point, “How involved in the action or reflection of the poem is the voice? What is the perspective or ‘point of view’ of the speaker? The perspective can be social, intellectual, political, even physical—there are many different perspectives, but they all contribute to how the world of the poem is seen, and how we respond.”

3. What is the poem’s subject?

Quite plainly, what is the poem about? What happens in the poem? In speculative poetry this may appear to be evident, but remember that poetry loves to play about with language, and the apparent meaning is not always the only one.

4. What is the poem’s structure?

How is the poem put together? Does it have sections in stanzas or does it employ paragraphs? Also pay attention to the “plot” of the poem, the way the presentation of the material is developed.

5. How does the poem use its setting?

Try to find the time, place, and physical location of the poem. This is especially important in speculative poetry as the time could be the far future or the distant past. The location could be a spaceship or a castle in a swamp. Knowing where and when the poem takes place will either make the poem more concrete as you associate your knowledge of a time and place with that in the poem, or it will set the mood or create other associations based on what is in your memory.

6. How does the poem use imagery?

You already looked at the images of the physical realm in question 5, but you should also pay attention to figures of speech such as metaphors. These extend the imaginative reach of the poem, an aspect especially important to the speculative poem.

7. Examine the poem’s language.

How does the sound of the poem contribute to its meaning? Try to find the rhythm of the poem (not always an easy task, especially in free verse). Look at the kinds of words that are used, pay attention to multiple connotations or associations. Are there multiple meanings of the words the poets used? Did the poet use puns?

8. Look at the references and history.

Can you associate this poem with another piece of writing? Lye uses the examples of the U2 song “Trip Through Your Wires” where the lyrics “I was thirsty and you wet my lips” area a direct reference from Matthew 25:35 in the Bible. Bono is perhaps blowing up his own ego by using the same words that are ascribed to Jesus. In the Bible verse, Jesus says “I was thirsty and you wet my lips” to the people who were saved as an explanation of what they did correct.

9. What qualities does the poem evoke in the reader?

Works of art evoke a reader’s memories of taste, experience, and values. These memories work to inform the reader of the poem. Well-written poetry will evoke these memories from a reader even if the specific details of the poem are such that never occurred in real life to the reader.

10. What is the poem’s worldview?

This is perhaps something to look into when you have more experience reading speculative poetry. Lye asks, “What are the basic ideas about the world that are expressed? What areas of human experience are seen as important, and what is valuable about them? What areas of human experience or classes of person are ignored or denigrated?” Even as you explore this, be sure to understand your own historical and cultural distance from the work. Your own experiences and your understanding of your own culture (or sub-culture) will inform your understanding of the poem as a whole and its worldview in particular.

GOING BEYOND

There is simply no better way to understand poetry than to attempt to create your own. Whether it is a simple acrostic, where you take the letters of a word and make a line of poetry from each, to a complex free verse, to an epic written in iambic pentameter, only in attempting to write a poem can you truly feel out the subtleties and beauty of the text. It’s like learning a foreign language. Sure, it is difficult, and yes, working with the grammar can be annoying at times, but in the end you have an appreciation and better understanding of your native tongue. Poetry opens up prose to a whole new level of meaning and an appreciation of one enhances the other.

Your own poems will likely be pretty poor at first. I know mine are and will be for a time to come. But as with most things, perseverance will win out. Sure, I’m not a good poet right now, but I can already better appreciate the poetry written by others. This is what I really seek in writing my own poetry. Just like the students I teach—who always begin with “I hate poetry” whenever I begin their poetry unit for the year; only when the students go through the effort to create their own poetry do they come to value it as an art form.

CONCLUSION

SF poetry is out there, and it wants more readers. Hopefully this little guide will make approaching this seemingly daunting part of SF a little bit easier, a little more fun, and a little more valued. I know writing it has for me.

John Ottinger III is a graduate student and educator whose reviews, interviews, and articles have appeared in WORLD, Publishers Weekly, Black Gate, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, SF Signal, Sacramento Book Review, and at Tor.com. Find him online at www.graspingforthewind.com.

2011 Nebula Award Nominations Open

JohnK — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:30:34 +0000

We can’t imagine anyone who reads this site doesn’t know about the Nebula Awards, but in case you didn’t, the 2011 version of the Nebula awards are now open for nomination! You need to be either an active or an associate member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in order to be eligible to nominate and vote on the Nebulas. What’s eligible for nomination you ask? Thankfully SFWA has a whole page of its website dedicated to describing the Nebula rules. The big thing to keep in mind is that it’s only for material that’s published within the calendar year of the awards (in this case, January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011).

So what does that mean for Electric Velocipede? Well, clearly issue #23 is coming out in 2011. It gets muddier when we look at the double issue #21/22. The issue clearly has a 2010 cover date. But the issue was not available last year. It was not generally available to the public until July 2011. It would seem that #21/22 would be eligible for this year’s Nebula nominations (should we get the unlikely confluence of SFWA members having read the stories AND deciding they were worthy of nominations*). Does the printed cover date change things? What do you think?

* Not because there isn’t great fiction in Electric Velocipede #21/22. On the contrary, it’s filled with amazing stuff. It just had a limited release so that reduces opportunities for people to see it.

“∞°” by Darin Bradley

JohnK — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:14 +0000

Special thanks to Charles A. Tan for helping get this page set up!

Two Poems by Alexandra Seidel

JohnK — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:30:54 +0000

Her Mother’s Bees

by Alexandra Seidel

A girl
covered in nothing but a scarf of a thousand thousand bees
and the bees
feasting on her like they would on a flower
extracting nectar from her pores,
her scented skin

the buzzing lifts the air;
it floats
and settles around your head
like a cauldron, upside down

Do you understand
that honey is food for bees,
jealously guarded?

You paint your lips golden
and light a cigar
so your image can waver in the smoke

The girl looks at you, shy thing,
brushing her scarf with a hand
bee wings trembling
as her fingers touch them

My mother gave me this scarf,
she says, eyes dropping to your
black leather shoes

I know,
say you, and from your pocket
like a piece of legerdemain
you produce a pomegranate
the purplish red so much brighter
than the humming

You tear the fruit’s skin away
with your teeth,
spit it on the floor,
hold the twinkling seeds up to her face

Take it, you say, eat,
and you watch her
shed her mother’s scarf

The Girl and Her Cloud

by Alexandra Seidel

There is a darkness about that girl
and it follows her
like a pet cloud on a leash
tenderly licking her cheeks with raindrops
filling her gaze with mirrored thunder
as she walks among others
talks or flirts, tells gossip but
keeps secrets to herself

you can smell the darkness
of the cloud like a hail storm on the air
her lungs are filled with wind
but that makes her kisses no less sweet
In bed, there is sunset-scratched cloudshine
reflected in her eyes
but you know that the cloud won’t leave her
so you do

and watch her stroll away
as if jumping from puddle to puddle
In the curve of her spine you see even more
clouds forming, conquering silvery horizon;
you remember how people have died
facing clouds, tornadoes, flash floods,
lightning, swallowed by snow storms
and you know you’ll never see her again

Notes from the author:

On “Her Mother’s Bees”
This poem was born from smoke, the smoke beekeepers use to distract bees. And it is one more poem about Persephone, obviously, though for me the driving image here were Demeter’s bees feasting on Persephone, watching over her and keeping her nigh immobile.

On “The Girl and her Cloud”
A poem about suicide, survival, and choice. Or just two people who are too different, if this interpretation is more to your liking.

Alexandra Seidel writes poems and stories of strange things and people, and some of her tales are darker than others. She swears, sometimes ideas come to her all fancy dressed with painted masks of scarlet and emerald, silver and gold. Thanks to some strangely good fortune, her work is (or soon will be) Out There: Bull Spec, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit and others. Alexandra is the poetry editor for Niteblade and Fantastique Unfettered. You can read her blog (which she really tries to update once or twice a month) here: www.tigerinthematchstickbox.blogspot.com

“A Reason to Fear Life, a Reason to Crave Death” by Andrew Kaye

JohnK — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:30:07 +0000

A bitter wind whipped around Ortega’s body, dusting him with a flurry of ash. He cursed. The words were lost, drowned in the whirr of stabilizers and the whine of steam turbines. Ortega drew his coat in tighter, pulled his scarf up over his face.

Another, stronger gust caused the freighter to lurch, and Ortega cursed again as he felt his balance falter. He held fast to the balloon rigging, braced one foot against the deck rail. He breathed in sharply. It was a long way down. Below, he could see the bulbous silhouette of the freighter, a tiny thumbprint of shadow against the nondescript landscape of the Fringe.

Freighters weren’t allowed east of the 23rd Parallel of Longitude. The smugglers Ortega had hired flew high to avoid detection, but conditions at those altitudes were dangerous at the best of times. The wind and ash had only gotten worse the further east they traveled. Toward the Veiled Sunrise. Toward Saturnina.

Ortega normally didn’t travel so far into the East. But business demanded otherwise. The plague had returned.

Twelve days ago there was a letter. And a box. Both were delivered to Ortega’s home in Puerto Engranaje; the former object carried by a wiry, middle-aged courier, the latter borne between a pair of hollow-eyed grave laborers.

Ortega was immediately suspicious. His hand went to his knife, loosened it from the sheath. “The dead don’t walk in Engranaje, friend,” he said. “There are laws against the grave trade.”

The courier bowed. “Sebastián Ortega. A pleasure. I assure you my business here is legitimate. My assistants and I won’t be here long.” He motioned for them to lower the box. “I bring greetings from Saturnina.”

“Your accent and your company betray you. You’re clearly from Caldierra.”

“You’ve been away from Saturnina too long, Ortega. Things have changed. Saturnina is now under Caldierra’s protection. Stop fingering your knife,” the courier said with a smile. “I don’t care about your past, and I’m not here on behalf of the Merchant Lords. I serve Señor Duelo de Saturnina. He requested your assistance personally.”

Ortega took the envelope from him. “A job?”

“Yes. Those are your instructions; you’ll find a formal contract on the last page. The box holds your down payment.” As he said this he waved for the grave laborers to remove the lid, which they did with stiff-limbed compliance.

“I have little interest in money these days,” Ortega said.

The courier shrugged. “Señor Duelo was confident you’d accept his offer. He mentioned a reunion.”

Ortega felt the courier watching carefully as he opened the envelope and looked over the message within. He was familiar with the handwriting: neat, practiced, precise. He saw lines about the plague, statistics and figures, estimated infected. Then a name caught his eye. A name he had tried forgetting for nearly ten years. “Luz . . . ?”

“Luz Doslunas? Do you know her?”

“I do. I did. It’s . . . not important.” He had read enough. “Very few things could get me to travel back East,” he said, signing the contract. “It seems Señor Duelo knows me too well. The down payment will be sufficient. Take the contract to him. Tell him I’ll leave as soon as I’m able. I need to make some preparations, travel arrangements.”

“Don’t take too long,” the courier warned. “The plague isn’t as widespread as it was in Caldierra, but Saturnina’s not big enough to accommodate one of any size.” Ortega thought he looked sad, distracted. “I’ll report to the governor at once. He’ll be very pleased, Ortega, thank you. And good luck.”

Then he left, grave laborers shuffling behind him. Ortega didn’t watch them leave. He only whispered softly to himself as old memories piled one on top of the other like slabs of granite. “A plague in Saturnina. And Luz hasn’t been able to stop it . . . .”

Ash rode on the back of every gust of wind. It latched onto whatever it touched, the freighter and everything on it covered in a thin layer of gray. The smugglers had stripped the craft down, trading armor plating for speed. A dangerous decision. If the ash accumulated too thickly, it could damage the freighter’s moving parts. As the craft flew toward Saturnina, the crew went to work with rags and tarpaulins, cleaning and protecting the more sensitive pieces of machinery. Ortega stood aside, trying hard to ignore the weather. He kept his mind on business. On the plague. On what would soon be expected of him.

“Nearly there,” came a brusque voice. Ortega turned to see the captain standing beside him. Ash clung to his hair and beard, aging him fifteen years, but the captain didn’t seem to mind. “We’ll go high until your signal,” he said, repeating the orders Ortega had discussed with him earlier, “but I won’t lie to you. I’m worried you’re overconfident. At least take Lucas and Ariana with you.”

Ortega shook his head. “No need. They’d only cause suspicion. I’ve done this before, Capitán. I can gauge it well enough.” He forced himself to smile. “The plaguewalker should be dead by morning, and once it’s gone the plague victims will be cured. But don’t wait around for me. If you don’t get my signal, assume the worst.”

“And you’re certain it’s a plaguewalker?”

“I am,” Ortega he said after a heavy exhalation of breath. “The governor wouldn’t have sent for me otherwise. There’s no mistaking the symptoms.”

Nausea. Dizziness. Chronic pain. Blotchy skin. Fevered delirium. The list went on. The symptoms were bad enough on their own, and worse collectively, but the plague wasn’t a normal disease. A person couldn’t sicken and die from the plague. They could only sicken and live. Therein lay the cause of greatest concern: a victim would live in a miserable state of near-immortality unless someone killed them—and after only a few days of infection, they often wished that someone would.

It was unnatural. Sorcerous. And only plaguewalkers spread it.

No one knew how, or how they drew strength from the eternal misery of their victims. Ortega didn’t worry about that. Like their victims, plaguewalkers were near immortal, and Ortega was careful to separate needless details from those that were truly important: How to find them. How to kill them.

He knew the subtle signs of their inhumanity: the parchment-like yellowing of the whites of their eyes, the grayish tinge to their skin. He knew their strengths. Their weaknesses.

He knew the same things Luz knew.

The captain saw Ortega’s change of expression. “Something wrong?”

“Just thinking of someone in Saturnina. An old friend.”

“A woman,” the other said knowingly.

“A woman, yes. A colleague.”

Ortega heard the captain sigh. “Has the plague taken hold of her?”

“No,” Ortega said with a slow shake of his head. “But I’m worried something else has.”

He was dropped off a mile from the town’s main gate. Ortega watched as the freighter rose slowly, becoming a black spot overhead before finally disappearing into the swirls of ashen clouds.

He used the walk to take stock of his weapons, to run scenarios through his head. “You can never be too careful with plaguewalkers,” he had told Luz once. The memory made him smile; she was a daring curandero, using tactics completely unlike the measured caution he used while on the job. They had balanced each other nicely. Maybe if things had turned out differently—

“You there!” someone shouted. “Where did you come from and what’s your business? The governor has this town on quarantine!”

Ortega looked up to see a guard peering down at him from a gatehouse window. His face was pinched and beady-eyed like a crow’s, and his expression was one Ortega was all too familiar with. The guard was there because someone had forced him to be.

“I’ve come at the governor’s request,” Ortega said, pulling out the letter. The seal stood out like a burgundy stain on the paper. “Sebastián Ortega de Engranaje, at your service. The sooner you let me in, the sooner I can rid you of your plaguewalker.”

He saw the guard turn and say something to an unseen companion. Soon one of the heavy, wrought iron doors was swung open, and another guard beckoned him inside. “We’ve been expecting you,” this guard said. “You couldn’t have come soon enough. Another victim was claimed yesterday, a prominent gentleman of Señor Duelo’s staff. Everyone’s more frightened than before.” The guard was young, sturdily built. He gave Ortega a wry smile. “Welcome to Saturnina, friend.”

Ortega stepped inside. And frowned.

“Saturnina,” he breathed. “It’s been a while . . . .”

Things had changed. He felt as though he wasn’t looking at Saturnina itself, but an old photograph of it; similar in appearance, but yellowed and faded and weathered around the edges. It had never been a vibrant town, but neither had it ever been in such a gloomy state of disrepair.

He walked down the wide streets, past the shuttered shops of apothecaries and machinists, smiths and gearmongers, and various other stores and workshops squeezed between the town’s neat lines of narrow row houses. But everything sagged. Everything looked sodden. Many of the buildings appeared abandoned; some even had their windows boarded up, their doors barred shut.

The street sloped upward as Ortega turned northeast into a more familiar part of town. The buildings looked better cared for, but even here Ortega could see the signs of age and disrepair slowly enveloping the neighborhood as had a strangler fig. The plant had already suffocated Saturnina’s clock tower, turning it into a dilapidated hulk of wood and brick and broken glass, its dirtied face frozen in a lopsided 10:15 grin.

The approach of sunset betrayed the true time. Ortega turned to look into the distance, past the iron-spiked walls and into the gentle curve of the western horizon.

He had forgotten how incredible the sunset could be from the Fringe. The atmosphere out East was choked with volcanic ash; out West, it was pale and blue. The Fringe, caught between East and West, saw the sunrise filtered through a veil of brown and gray, while the sunset irradiated the western horizon with such comparative brilliance that it amounted to a religious experience.

Sunset made even Saturnina beautiful, if only for a moment. It painted the streets and buildings in orange and purple and gold, and gave a warm glow to the familiar building a few paces ahead. Ortega’s body formed a long shadow across it. Once upon a time, he had done research here. Once, he had called the building home.

II.

It happened ten years ago. Ortega couldn’t remember what he had stepped out for, only that as he returned, a man in a long red cloak was ascending the stairs to his room. He watched as the man knocked, tried the door. It wasn’t locked. When the last scrap of crimson slithered through the doorway, Ortega advanced.

He tugged his weapon free, an unusual mess of reinforced wood and precision clockwork. Ortega flipped the catch. Hurried clicks sounded the meshing of gears and the release of coils. The weapon unfolded like an insect’s limb, the joints snapping together to form a heavy crossbow. Almost as an afterthought, a bayonet sprouted from the stock with a soft metallic scraping. Ortega loaded a bolt. Crept quietly into the room.

The man was facing his desk, fumbling through bottled samples and scientific equipment. And books. Old, valuable books, many of them on loan from Señor Duelo himself. Ortega pressed the tip of the bayonet, cold and sharp, against the nape of the man’s neck. “I didn’t come to Saturnina to be hounded by Guild trash,” he said. “Leave quietly. One twitch of my finger and I assure you that the blade at your neck will be the least of your worries.”

The man had gone stiff. “Don’t shoot. This is a misunderstanding.”

Ortega’s captive slowly brought his hands into view. The nails were black, the flesh from fingertip to forearm stained with orange and brown.

Ortega said, “An embalmer? Interesting. Turn around, I want to see your face.”

Sure enough, the man was tattooed under his left eye with a complicated glyph confirming his trade. Ortega spent only half a minute on the embalmer’s face. Frowned at what he saw below the neck.

The man was bare-chested. All over was a latticework of stitches and bruised flesh. In the center, bolted directly into his breastbone, was a golden sigil engraved with skulls and serpents. Ortega had only seen such a mark once before: on a sullen Caldierran exile in Puerto Hierro.

“You must have done something pretty serious to have your soul cut out,” he said.

“It’s complicated,” the embalmer said, “but I hope my service will earn me a pardon. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t kill me until after I get my soul back. I apologize for entering uninvited, but Lord Muertoculta wasn’t even sure if you were still living here.”

“Merchant Lord Muertoculta? What does he want?”

“To pay you,” the embalmer-emissary said. “Please, Ortega. Put the crossbow away.”

The emissary took him to a table in the teahouse across the street. It was crowded. Ortega pulled up a crate of chamomile and had a seat. The air was damp with the scent of herbs and flowers. Somewhere, a musician was strumming lazily on a guitar.

Ortega tried to focus on the people around the table, appraising Muertoculta’s hirelings with the critical eye of a professional. Most of them looked too inexperienced—little better than hired thugs—save the woman directly across from him. She wore plain, utilitarian clothes of a modified freightlander design, but braided feathers in her hair in the Old Style. It was an unusual combination, but Ortega found he liked the way it looked. The woman met his eyes. Quirked her brow.

“Ortega here has agreed to Lord Muertoculta’s terms,” the emissary said. “We have our second curandero.” Ortega heard the woman snort. Obviously, she had been the first. “We’ll leave Saturnina tomorrow morning. The coaches will be at the opposite side of town at quarter to ten.”

“He’s a freightlander,” the woman said, interrupting him. Ortega could hear the disbelief escape her lips like a hiss of steam. “You never said anything about that. Plaguewalkers don’t travel that far west; does he even know what one looks like?”

Ortega smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve lived here in Saturnina for the past six months. Before that I was up in Mezquisol for nearly five years.”

She looked at him. “I grew up in Mezquisol.”

“Really? Then you’re probably familiar with the curandero Gabriél Doslunas.”

A smile cracked through like sunlight through the Veil. “He was my grandfather.”

“You cannot be serious!”

She extended her hand across the table. “Luz Doslunas.”

“Sebastián Ortega,” he said, firmly grasping her wrist in the freightlander fashion. “I have no shame admitting it: I’m a bit jealous. I’ve read all of Señor Doslunas’ books. Amazing stuff. I’m a better curandero because of them, so I’m sure you’re particularly skilled.”

The light was such that he couldn’t see her blush, but the smile was unmistakable. “Maybe I can show you a few new techniques,” Luz said with a shrug.

“Your confidence is reassuring,” the emissary said. “But I have to warn you, this job won’t be easy. The plague has hit Caldierra pretty hard. It snakes through the barrios, swallowing up people like a python. Poor people, mostly. So many that the Merchant Lords worried it would affect the grave trade.”

“And that’s why we’re here?” Ortega scoffed. “To protect their precious grave trade? Don’t the Merchant Lords give a damn about the health and safety of their own people?”

“Well, they do now,” the emissary said. “When they thought the plague was only a poor people’s disease, they figured they could contain it on their own. They contracted out folks like me to scour the city and cull the infected. Mercy killings, really, enough to keep the grave trade afloat. But a merchant’s daughter was accidentally killed with the others. Now they don’t know what to do.”

“They hired us,” offered Ortega. “That’s a step in the right direction.”

The emissary shook his head. “House Muertoculta hired you. And outside Guild Consensus, I might add. As far as I know, the Merchant Lords are still arguing a decision, but Lord Osmín Muertoculta grew tired of waiting. It was his daughter that came down with the plague.”

“Then we should start looking for the plaguewalker wherever she was found,” Luz said. Her eyes shot briefly to the sigil on the emissary’s chest, then flicked back up to meet his face. “Your unique situation is sure to give us some insights there, correct? Perhaps we’re fortunate that Guild Law is so strict regarding the deaths of their own.”

The emissary looked troubled. Brought his hand to the sigil, as if it suddenly pained him. He nodded slowly. “I can tell you where I found her, yes. She was out in District Six, in the Sprawls. She never even left her own neighborhood.”

Five days later they were in the Sprawls of Caldierra. Three weeks after that, the plaguewalker was still at large.

The ashenfall had been unseasonably heavy that year. The dirty rains that followed filled the streets with a mud of ash and filth that squelched beneath Ortega’s boots with every step. Grave laborers toiled to clear away the muck, their shovels clinking and scraping against the ancient paving stones. People walked by without so much as a second glance. Ortega muttered, tried to ignore the noise, the damp, the stench of ash and necromancy.

The city was built upon the bones of an older civilization. Thousand-year-old stonework supported multi-storied buildings of stuccoed brick and gray-stained terracotta. Ancient glyphs leered at Ortega from the ground floors. Buzzards clustered around the rooftops like pigeons. “I feel like I’m walking through a tomb,” he said. “A noisy, poorly drained tomb.”

“It’s not all bad,” Luz said with a friendly nudge. “They keep fresh flowers in the windows.”

“Every grave needs its bouquet.” Ortega saw her roll her eyes. “Sorry. I still feel out of place here. If I didn’t have you to keep me company, I think I’d be completely lost.”

“It’s culture shock.”

“Three weeks’ worth, yes. If any of our leads actually led us anywhere, I might be too busy to notice. But whatever rathole the plaguewalker operates from, it’s a damned good one. And so I do notice. The people here are a strange sort, Luz.” He motioned toward the grave laborers. “No one should be so casual about death.”

“You think they should fear it instead? We live in a world of plaguewalkers, Sebastián. They give us a reason to fear life.” He could feel her searching his expression. “Are you afraid of death?”

“No. But I’m wary of it. Anything less seems inhuman.”

“Inhuman?” Luz said, laughing. “Caldierra’s hardly the place for that word.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I know you don’t like it. It takes some getting used to. But it does have its charms, if you take the trouble to look.”

He shrugged. They had entered the wealthier section of District Six, where the merchant class had built haciendas on the ruins of an ancient temple complex. Ortega looked around. Found nothing charming. Found something else instead.

As they walked by the hacienda of House Muertoculta, a maid exited from a side door. She carried a wicker basket, dumped the contents into the gutter. Out fell day-old vegetables, crusts of bread, toughened meat. Table scraps for the buzzards and the homeless. The former had already taken notice, shuffling from side to side anxiously from the roof. They made noise, bobbed their heads.

The woman turned to watch Luz and Ortega walk by. Briefly, very briefly. But in that moment, Ortega caught a glimpse of her face. He saw the flash of gray flesh. Raised his crossbow to his shoulder.

“What are you doing?!” Luz hissed.

“The housemaid,” he said, taking careful aim. “She’s our plaguewalker.”

The plaguewalker pivoted, hand snapping forward. There was a cracking sound as the oncoming bolt was split in two, the pieces spinning away harmlessly. “Damn it,” Ortega said, winching another bolt into place. “Right out of the air. . . .”

Luz charged. Drew her blades with a flourish. They flicked and spun around her with such speed that the sunlight reflected off of them in short, angry flashes.

The plaguewalker sprang forward to meet Luz’s attack.

Ortega watched those first crucial seconds from down the stock of his crossbow, waiting for a clear shot. The plaguewalker was faster than them, stronger than them. Better than them. This was a straight fight. Two against one. And the one was as good as six. The plaguewalker was parrying Luz’s swords with the palms of her hands.

Anyone else would have grown frustrated. Not Luz. She moved with a purpose, one Ortega quickly realized was some unspoken plan of attack that he was expected to follow. And so Luz would move there and let the plaguewalker counter there, presenting a target that Ortega immediately exploited.

He fired, loaded, winched. Fired again. The plaguewalker was hit in the shoulder, the leg, the lower back. She turned to snarl at him, only to be caught in the cheek by a quick thrust from Luz.

Then the fight took a different turn. As a bright red line welled up along her cheek, the plaguewalker’s hand went for Luz’s neck. Ortega could see the muscles in the plaguewalker’s arm tighten. She was lifting Luz off the ground by the throat.

Ortega didn’t like remembering that day.

Like every battle before it, this one had stored itself in his memory as fleeting scraps of sights and sounds and smells: Luz hurled into the street, the plaguewalker’s laughter, other people’s blood.

He remembered shouting something—a challenge, or maybe Luz’s name. Then the plaguewalker crashed into him, wielding one of Luz’s swords. He had no time to react. The back of his head hit the paving stones. His vision exploded with tiny sunbursts.

He was sprawled out, wide-eyed and gasping like a stranded fish. Ortega couldn’t see properly; the world had become all shapes and hazy outlines. He saw the plaguewalker as a brown-black stain against the sky, felt her foot pressing down on his chest. There was a blurred suggestion of movement. A sharp pain in his leg.

Then another shape slammed into the first, freeing him. Ortega struggled to his feet. As his vision slowly returned, he saw Luz grappling with the plaguewalker. Her face growled defiance, but her limbs screamed desperation. The plaguewalker was winning. They were running out of time.

Against plaguewalkers, there was no such thing as a fair fight. Nothing short of trickery could reliably defeat them. Ortega knew this all too well. And he liked to be prepared.

He reached into his pockets, fingered the explosives within. He smiled as the narrow cylinders rubbed against one another with a reassuring metallic scraping.

Ortega braced the crossbow in one hand, held a bomb in the other. He aimed his bolt at the plaguewalker’s throat, hit the collarbone instead. The effect was the same. She reeled back, clutching at the bolt. Ortega armed the bomb with a quick twist of the detonator. Gears and tumblers rattled inside.

“Luz,” he said breathlessly, “get away from there!”

“What?”

“Run!”

Luz broke into a sprint. Ortega tossed the bomb and lurched into an agonizing sprint of his own. He heard the cylinder bounce once, twice, saw the buzzards instinctively disperse. He covered his ears. Closed his eyes.

There was a thump and rumble. The ground shook, the buildings shuddered. Ortega felt the heat on his back, and his nostrils filled with the tang of alchemy and blasting powder. When he ventured a look back he saw a circle of shattered paving stones and a pall of red smoke. The plaguewalker was there, clothes tattered and smoldering, flesh raw and scorched. But still standing. Ortega slowly brought his crossbow to his shoulder again. How was the damn thing still standing?

Luz must have been feeling the same way. “A bigger bomb next time, I think,” she said.

Ortega smiled mirthlessly.

Standing or not, the plaguewalker was still injured. Badly. She hissed at them. Clutched at her side. Fled.

Instinct told Ortega to follow, but his leg suddenly buckled. He stumbled to the hacienda wall, throwing his weight against it with a wince. A dark, damp stain was blossoming from his calf. He tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt, tied it tight above the bleeding. He cursed. “That was clever,” he said. “House Muertoculta is the best rathole she could have hoped for.”

“We should go after her,” Luz said, breathless. “She’s wounded.”

“I’m wounded.”

Luz saw the blood. “Sebastián! How badly did she get you?”

“Not badly enough. I’m still alive.”

She grinned. “Do you need any help?”

“No.”

“Are you okay to walk?”

“I’m okay to limp. Slowly.”

Her expression was anxious. Ortega thought it was for him. “Then I’ll go after her alone,” she said, lightly kissing him on the cheek. “But I’ll need to leave now.”

He shook his head. “You should at least call the others.”

“I’m not wasting this opportunity,” Luz said. “I can handle this. You know I can handle this; I have more experience than you. This is in my blood, Sebastián. Stay here. Call for the others if you want, but I’ll probably have this taken care of before they arrive.”

There was no arguing. No opportunity. She rushed off, her cheeks flushed with confidence. Ortega watched her go, trying to ignore the stinging in his leg. “Just because you have an opportunity,” he said to himself, “doesn’t mean it’s a good one.”

The plaguewalker was found dead the next morning. Luz was found nearby.

Her breathing was ragged, her body torn apart. Her right leg, her chest, the back of her left shoulder—if Luz survived, she’d be left with several clear reminders of the plaguewalker’s strength.

House Muertoculta was generous. They put her up in one of their spare rooms and told Ortega she could stay there for as long as was required. Physicians came in, stitched her wounds with black threads, wrapped them in pulped herbs and ribbons of soft gauze. They didn’t bother sedating her. Luz was comatose.

Ortega stayed in Caldierra for two months. He visited regularly. Her room always smelled of poultices and chemicals, and she was always dressed in clean bandages and hooked to tubes piping oddly colored solutions into her limbs. Ortega didn’t understand the science of physicians, nor did he like the look of it. Every visit, he asked them how she was doing. Every visit, he had to shoo the necromancers away.

Her condition never improved. When he had no choice but to move on, he tried to forget about Luz. It would take ten years before her name resurfaced: as a passing reference in the governor’s contract.

III.

Purple lingered on the horizon. Stars strained against the haze overhead. Ortega watched as streetlamps shuddered to life in pale shades of white and blue and yellow. “Fae lamps,” he muttered under his breath. “Saturnina’s becoming so like Caldierra that I can scarcely tell the two apart. . . .”

He followed the fae-lit street until he found the building he was looking for. Above the door, swinging slightly in the breeze, was a sign painted with a crude caricature of a sad-faced tavern girl carrying a sickle. The paint was dull and fading. Melancholy Wench read the sign. Tavern and Inn elaborated a window display. Vacancy added a placard.

Ortega stepped inside. Bypassed the deserted front desk. Wandered into the tavern. He carefully noted every available exit, squinting against the poor light. More fae lamps. They were strung across the walls and centered on every table. Ortega draped his coat across the nearest chair and rested his weapon, a clumsy-looking alchemist’s carbine, on the table. He stared into the glass bulb. He couldn’t tell whether the faerie inside was exhausted or just poorly paid. The phosphorescence it cast across the tabletop was as dull as a waning ember.

Luckily, he knew how fae lamps worked. “Pay attention,” he said, lightly tapping the glass. “I can barely see.” The faerie pulsed brighter. Gave a rude hand gesture.

The dead man shuffled up beside him so quietly that Ortega hardly noticed. Shirt, pants, and apron hung loosely from the grave laborer’s shriveled frame. A recent construct. Ortega could tell from the stench of embalming fluid that lingered around him like a gentleman’s cologne.

“I wish I could say I’m surprised to see your kind here,” he said.

The grave laborer didn’t respond, only stared at him despite empty sockets. It shoved a paper and pencil forward, its wrinkled dead fingers crackling like dry leaves as Ortega gingerly accepted the items. “I cannot speak,” the paper read in the thick block-lettering of a printing press. “Please circle your order on the menu below. Payment up front. Place coins in apron pocket. No tips necessary.” What followed was a list of plain-sounding tavern food.

Plain-sounding or not, Ortega was hungry. He wondered if the cook was a grave laborer, too. He didn’t like the idea of a creature without a sense of taste preparing his food. He wrote a quick note on the menu and handed it back to the corpse. “I’m looking for your master, Luz Doslunas,” he said. “Please give this message to her.”

He didn’t have to wait long before the familiar figure of Luz appeared in the doorway. “Well. . . . Sebastián Ortega. I never expected to see you here,” she said. Despite everything, Ortega found himself smiling. She still wore feathers in her hair.

A platter of food was placed in front of him, plus a mug of fine-smelling beer. Luz sat across from him, her elbows resting on the table. “It’s been a long time,” she said.

“Too long,” he agreed. “You’re looking well. The years have been kind to you; they’ve been far crueler to me, I’m afraid. I never got out of the business of hunting plaguewalkers. I should have retired from it all, like you. Gotten a tavern of my own.”

“It’s not as exciting,” she admitted. “But after my injuries in Caldierra. . . .”

“I understand,” he said with a nod. Ortega began eating, tearing away small pieces of chicken and popping them into his mouth. It was good. He tried not to think of grave laborers in the kitchens.

He watched Luz’s eyes fall on the weapon. “This is different,” she said, picking it up to examine the strange device. “Like a crossbow minus the bow. Clockwork, I take it? You freightlanders will never change.”

“It’s an alchemist’s carbine,” Ortega said. “Runs on clockwork and gaseous chemicals I can’t even pronounce. That’s what’s in the drum here,” he said, tapping the heavy metallic cylinder locked into the stock. “It shoots bolts like a crossbow, but further, faster, and harder. You come out of retirement and I can get you one, too.”

Luz put it down, almost distastefully. “You know I prefer swords to machinery, Sebastián,” she said. “And I’m unlikely to become a curandero any time soon. I tried to help here, but. . . I’ve lost my touch, apparently.” She smiled weakly. “Obviously Señor Duelo feels the same way if he’s dragged you out here.”

“Señor Duelo doesn’t realize you’re part of the problem.” He looked directly into her eyes when he said it, locked onto hers with a hard, terrible stare. He tapped the fae lamp. Harder. The phosphorescence grew brighter, revealing the pallor of Luz’s face.

Gray. Gray as the Veiled Sunrise.

“Ah,” she said, her face frozen in that same weak smile. “So you know.”

Ortega watched as Luz’s fingers played across the shining ivory buttons of her blouse. First at the collar, slowly through the horizontal hole, then down to the one below. She followed the pattern, and he followed her motions, one after another, until each was unfastened. There was a time when such a sight was exactly what he wanted. Now it just seemed cruel.

She pulled her blouse open. Just enough. Ortega saw the jagged scar between the curves of her breasts. “It was the plaguewalker’s dying act,” Luz said, running a gray fingertip across the knot of pale, raised flesh. “She broke through the breastbone, secreted the progenitoxin into my heart. With my other injuries, I was powerless to stop her.” Luz gave him a strange smile as she buttoned up again. “It’s probably good that she did. I would have died otherwise.”

Ortega shook his head. “Listen to yourself. There’s nothing good about what’s happened, Luz! You’ve brought the plague to Saturnina!”

“I can’t help what I’ve become,” she said calmly.

“You should have listened to me back at Caldierra. You should have waited. Your recklessness was for nothing, Luz. Killing that housemaid didn’t lift the plague; there were two plaguewalkers prowling the Sprawls.” He searched her face for any signs of surprise, was rewarded only with a curious cock of the eyebrow. “I could have helped you defeat the first, and the second one would have soon followed. We worked well as a team, Luz. We should have fought them together. Now everything’s a mess.”

“My instincts had served me well in the past,” she said with a shrug. “Analysis is always easiest in hindsight.”

“I should have suspected from the beginning. Had I known your coma was just part of your transformation. . . . I was just so preoccupied with hunting down the second plaguewalker, none of it registered.”

Luz chuckled. “You surprise me, Sebastián! Would you have really killed me?”

“Better then than now.” Ortega tried to keep his face free of emotion. Knew it was impossible. Blushed when Luz laughed at him. “How is that funny?”

“You talk about killing me as if it would be the easiest thing in the world! As if you could kill a monster wearing the face of a friend. You’re not a weak man, Sebastián; if the plaguewalker here had been anyone but me, you would have done what you’ve always done. But this time’s different. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

He looked away, took a few more bites of food. “You know I can’t let you continue infecting Saturnina. But you’re right, I don’t want to kill you. I was hoping I could convince you to leave.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “You could come with me. A plaguewalker with all the knowledge and experience of a curandero. . . think of the good you could do! We could rid this world of plaguewalkers, Luz. Maybe even find you a cure.”

“You’re too hopeful.”

“I’m not. Please, Luz.”

She smiled. Laughed again, louder. “I don’t think so. A plaguewalker with all the knowledge and experience of a curandero only makes me a stronger plaguewalker! Because really, Sebastián. What curandero could possibly stop me?” Her laughter continued, thick and piercing in Ortega’s ears.

“It’ll have to be me, then.”

“You think you’re prepared for that?”

“I’m always prepared.”

“Or course you are. And you’ll be happy to know your precaution has rubbed off on me.” Her smile was broad and toothy. “I infected your food.”

Ortega had studied plaguewalkers for years. Read more books than he ever thought existed on the subject. Conducted experiments with alchemical fluids and decaying tissue samples. But how did plaguewalkers transmit their disease? The scholarly answers were nothing but rumor and conjecture.

He had never even thought about the food.

He went for his carbine, but his fingers were unable to wrap around the stock before Luz flicked her wrist in a thaumaturgical gesture. Ortega gasped. Plague. He could feel it bubbling to life inside of him. It was so strong that it dragged him to his knees. He tried again in vain to grab the carbine, scrabbling madly at it, but failing to do anything but jostle it across the table’s surface, nearly knocking over the lamp and sending his plate and silverware clattering to the floor.

With every twist of Luz’s wrist, Ortega could feel the strength of the plague ebb and flow in his body. There was no fighting it. It was crawling out from his stomach and into his extremities. Luz’s hand clenched into a fist. The pain became so horrible that he could do nothing but tumble backward.

“The control is incredible, isn’t it?” she said haughtily.

Ortega went wide-eyed as he saw a pair of grave laborers move up beside him. He could hear the soles of their feet shuffle across the floorboards with a sandpapery scraping. Each knelt on either side of him and pinned his arms.

Luz hovered over him. Straddled his waist. Ortega shut his eyes, tried to squirm free with a groan of defiance. She shushed him, caressed the side of his face. Ortega found it difficult to speak, but he didn’t care. “What. . . what are you doing?” he said, fighting for every word, willing them out of his tightening throat.

“I agree with what you said earlier, Sebastián. We would make a great team. There’s no need to have you suffer through infection. I can make you a plaguewalker like me.”

Luz started unbuttoning his shirt. Pulled it open. Stopped.

“What’s this?” she said when her eyes fell upon the scar tissue, the shining gold sigil hammered into his chest.

It was Ortega’s turn to smile, but there was no happiness in it. “You know damn well what it is.”

“Your soul. . . . When did you have it removed?”

“Caldierra,” he said, the name a gurgle in his throat. “The second plaguewalker was a. . . a merchant. And Guild Law is strict.”

She took a deep breath, set her lower lip as if trying to come to terms with this new piece of information. She nodded. “Then my progenitoxin will be a blessing.”

“No! I have nothing left to live for, Luz. Nothing. I won’t become like you. And I won’t. . . I won’t let the Guild take my soul.” His own words, the subtle sounds of the space around him, was turning to gauze in his ears. He coughed. Nearly retched. The room and everything in it was becoming spotty and distorted. “This ends on my terms,” he said. “For once in my life, I can afford to be as reckless as you.”

“What are you talking about?!”

“Señor Duelo will. . . he’ll get me the pardon I need. I’ll be reunited in the end. I can die well.” Ortega managed a weak, defiant smile. “I’m sorry, Luz. The drum. . . in the carbine. . . it has more than one use. . . .”

He trembled. Nearly blacked out. The cunning timer mechanism on the carbine finally wound down. Gears spun. Coils relaxed. Hammers snapped into place, releasing sparks into the alchemical gas swirling around inside the drum.

The last thing Ortega heard was the soft click of release. For a moment, he saw his whole world explode into reds and yellows and oranges, every brilliant shade of flame imaginable. He knew the plague would be purged from Saturnina that day. Swallowed up in a sunset of his own making.

Andrew Kaye is a writer, a cartoonist, and a proud (but exhausted) father of two. His fiction has appeared most recently in Daily Science Fiction. Feel free to bother him on Twitter (@andrewkaye).